Oh The Food My Mother Cooks

On any given day, in Arizona, you can find my mother cooking something, she is an excellent cook. (She's a better cook than I am a writer.) Her mom, dad, and sister were and are expert cooks.

Judy, her sister, owned a restaurant in Tennessee where I worked summers busing tables, rolling napkins and washed dishes during my stay. I learned a lot about food and cooking in those summers.

The one thing my mother and my aunt cooked, especially for me, is rutabagas. If you don’t know what rutabagas are, you will have to check with a produce manager in your supermarket. They fall somewhere in-between a kohlrabi and a turnip, closer to a turnip I think. They are large and somewhat waxy in texture on the outside and very much like a hard potato on the inside. My mother would peel them, boil them and finally mash them into an iron skillet with bacon fat and fry them. Oh, for the love of bacon fat. This was love for me. Emeril has no clue. BAM! to you sir.

The other food, which I alway loved (I think I got it twice in 18 years), is ham hocks and beans with cornbread. But not just any cornbread, oh no. It was Jiffy cornbread, the little blue box that was three for a dollar -- that was something special. If you haven’t eaten it, you don’t know what you’re missing. It is manna from heaven that cornbread. But, of course, it's a southern thing. It's soul food.

Southern women know how to cook (my mother is originally from the south). The love they have for cooking is counted in the calorie content of their food, and their food alone. You ask Mrs. Paula Deen. If a southern woman cooks your food, the love she puts into her cooking will add 10 pounds to you before you leave the table. This is soul food, this is the food of love and this is my Southern heritage. Smothered chicken, red eye gravy, buttermilk biscuits and ham hocks do me just fine.

Thank you mom. Can you pass another biscuit? I still have gravy on my plate.