Cooked lentil fritters.

Muted Mush

My family likes to joke about the fact that I never have a way to finish the sentence, “I really miss my mom’s…” There are no gooey chocolate chip cookies to crave, no bubbling casseroles filled with cheese and holiday memories, no sun tea to slurp through a straw. My mom still asks, every time I come home, if I have any special requests for dinner, and then we both laugh and I remind her to pick up my favorite cereal from the store. It’s not that my mom can’t cook, or doesn’t cook; it’s just that for her, our kitchen has never primarily been a place of recipe crafting or apron wearing. Rather, it serves as the perfect space to enact her identity as a do-it-all mother of three with a firm belief in joy and a Scarlett O’Hara attitude about worries (“I’ll think about that tomorrow”). Continue reading