Home Cookin'

After months of the same routine of takeout, takeout, takeout, (ooohhh look: groceries! Oh wait, they’re gone), takeout, takeout, takeout…I run home to mommy. Well, it’s not so emasculating in real life, but essentially that is what I do. I can’t take the starving, the constant spending on takeout. It adds up. I’m still a hungry college kid, but taking the out and returning to the woman who fed you for eighteen years before you packed up and decided to try it on your own isn’t giving up. It’s just giving up for the holidays. Now is the time everyone should be with family anyways, so why shouldn’t I get a nice meal out of the deal? The cat is still at the apartment, so I don’t have to deal with him trying to eat my food for a week, I get to sleep in as late as I want, and the best part: I get fed. I don’t even have to work for my food, it comes to me. It’s like being in a restaurant where everything is free.

When I set foot in the door of my mother’s house for the first time I get critiqued. I am too skinny, I don’t eat well enough (that one’s true), you need more of this, and you need more of that. She might be right on most counts, but her nagging has me at two minutes in and remembering why I moved out in the first place. Then the smells bring me back. She is baking cookies. The little round chocolate Christmas cookies, the ones that make you cough if you inhale all the powdered sugar when you go to put it in your mouth. There are two dozen or so laid out across the counter, and another batch in the oven. In every corner I look there are little dishes filled with candies or chocolate covered pretzels or peanuts. I can’t help but eat a candy and a couple of the fresh cookies, the warm chocolate melting in my mouth behind the sweet overtones of the sugar, all before I unpack. Her excessive baking has me back on team mom, and happy I returned.

Dinner that night was baked macaroni and cheese, with small cubes of ham diced throughout and a crunchy bread crumb topping. She took it out of the oven boiling, bubbles popping from every corner of the dish and the cheese rolling like ocean waves. The smell was delicious, like every great mac and cheese concoction to come before, with a strong aroma of the cheese and the subtle tones of the ham, gently hidden within mounds of the shell pasta used instead of elbow macaroni. A steaming pile sat on my plate, far too much than I could normally eat but circumstances called for me to try. As I dove headfirst into the sea of cheese and ham, I realized why I came home in the first place. A mother’s home cooking is always better than anything I can make, or order. A mother’s cooking brings everyone who eats it back to their childhood; it sucks them out of their adult life with their concerns and their bills and their deadlines and puts them in the moment, in front of whatever dish was rolled out today—her meals are my ghosts of Christmas past, Christmas present, and Christmas future—they bring memories of my childhood, the meal in front of me, and the fantastic food yet to come.