The Universe can be insistent. Let's take a nostalgic little tour through the seventies, It suggested to me not long ago.
Nah, I said; that's okay. Let's let things completed rest.
Fine, said the Universe, and It smiled on me benignly.
And then made sure I went there, anyway.
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Sometimes, when weeknight meals get repetitive and boring ("Not ANOTHER stir fry!") I go searching for something a little different to cook.
That could be something new, or it could be, sort of, something retro.
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We get a lovely and mysterious delivery around the 20th of each month from a local meat processor: it is called 'The Butcher's Choice' package. The good folks at that enterprise bring the box right to the house. There is good stuff inside, often things I'd never think to buy.
When we first signed up, James said, darkly, "I hope they don't bring us tongue." After a moment's thought, he added, "Or TRIPE."
Mark allowed that HE wouldn't mind tripe; tripe, he said, is great in red sauce.
I said that, while that may be true, he'd be doing the cooking on that one.
But we speculated needlessly. The packages are always interestingly curated. There's fresh sausage and interesting varieties of bacon and patties and links. I may find chicken, both bone-in and boneless; pork in guise of chop and roast; lunch meats, sometimes, and smoked sausages and wieners; and a variety of cuts of beef, from stew beef chunks to porterhouse steaks.
We've gotten things like skirt steak, for example, which I had never cooked before; my buddy the Internet offered me several interesting options, and we had skirt steak fajitas not long ago, and they were mighty tasty.
So, anyway. One Friday, not long ago, I was casting about for something different to make with some boneless beef and/or pork from The Butcher's Choice box, and I thought about Beef Paprika.
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My friend Pam shared that recipe with me after serving it at a dinner, back in the early '70's. Pam's mom tested recipes for Betty Crocker, and this was a new recipe then; chunks of tender beef in a tangy red sauce covering a buttery base of wide egg noodles.
Pam had a crowd of us to her parents' house and served up a huge pot of Beef Paprika, and we ate like starving people, or like those in sudden presence of food-y revelation.
I begged Pam for the recipe, and, always gracious, she gave it to me; I cooked it faithfully back in those strange and unexpected times…made Beef Paprika time and again until I lost the recipe card and was very sad. The card must have disappeared during a youthful marriage dissolution or during moves to an efficiency apartment, or later, to my first home with Mark and Matthew.
Then it occurred to me that Pam's mom had been testing the recipe for Betty Crocker. I looked through the 'new' Betty Crocker Cookbook my brother Sean and I had gifted my mother with one seventies Christmas. And what do you know: there it was, that recipe, only its official name, now, was 'Hungarian Goulash.'
I felt like a little hole in the craggy wall of my psyche had just been plastered up. I copied the recipe out on special index-seized recipe cards Mom kept in a wooden box bedecked with red-painted strawberries (the recipe cards had strawberries on them, too.) I took the recipe home, and every once in a while, I would make up a batch, the kind of making that required long simmering and evoked a householdful of rich smells.
Mark and Matt liked that dish. Jim, later, tolerated it kindly.
Now Mom's worn and well-used recipe book lodges in my cookbook cabinet. And I get it out every so often, find the 'Hungarian Goulash' recipe, and enjoy making a batch. I appreciate the long-simmering and the tender meat; also, when it simmers, I always think about Pam, who had that dreadful disease and left us way too young.
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This is a long and roundabout way of saying that a few weeks ago, I made us a batch of Hungarian Goulash. I carefully removed that recipe page from Mom's seriously tattered old Betty Crocker Cookbook and tucked it onto the wooden recipe easel-holder Jim gifted me with a while back. I noted that, in the upper left-hand corner of the cookbook page, there is a recipe for Pepper Steak.
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I am often seduced, while shopping, by produce, and particularly by colorful sweet peppers. Not long ago, I brought home a bag of baby sweet peppers, little red, yellow, and orange gems. We put them in chili and in a soup; Mark ate slices, cold and crispy, like candy.
We only had a few peppers left, and, having recently vowed not to contribute any more to the kind of food waste that bloats greenhouse gases, I cast about for ways to use them.
And remembered the pepper steak recipe.
So yesterday, a rainy Thursday afternoon, I sliced tender beef, and I chopped those peppers, along with onions, and also some carrots and celery (these two were not called for in the recipe, but we like them.) I opened a can of diced tomato—the recipe calls for fresh, but these are tender, tasty, and right here…and I used our own beef broth to make a big batch of oven-baked rice.
The rain stopped; the world steamed, and Mark came in the door after work.
"What do I smell?" he asked. "Wait. Is that...Oh my God: pepper steak. This is so seventies!"
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Mark and I scooped pepper steak onto small mounds of sticky, tender rice; James put plain beef slices on his.
I felt good because we had used—and enjoyed—every bite of those peppers. Mark went back for hearty seconds. And, during dinner, we drifted lazily through memories of the seventies, a decade that brought us, Mark and me, into some semblance of adulthood, out of our school days, through tempestuous early relationships, headed us into beloved first careers.
Looking back, living through the seventies seems a lot like having navigated some potentially dangerous rapids. I'm proud to say I did it, I'm grateful for the learning and especially for the people who populated those days, and I'm quite content not to live in those particular anxieties anymore.
But food—and aromas—are powerful keys. The pepper steak unlocked a trove of memory for both of us. It was fun, for a little while, to revisit those youthful, vulnerable days.
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And last weekend we went for a getaway to Hudson, Ohio, where one of my favorite indie bookstores rests, waiting for me to visit; the town is also a mere 15 minutes from the entrance to Cuyahoga National Park. I tried to plan the weekend precisely: picked what looked like an awesome airbnb home, with an easy walk to downtown Hudson; found a unique-sounding diner; checked bookstore hours and national park guidelines.
And, while the airbnb was wonderful, and I bought a copy of Jacqueline Winspear's The White Lady at the Learned Owl Bookshop, not everything went according to plan.
For instance, I picked up a bout of stomach flu that has been chugging through my little city (I know it's been chugging because people on Facebook have been sharing details). I was fine as long as I didn't eat solid foods—and I didn't really want to go there, anyway. I subsisted happily on Canada Dry and rainbow sherbet, some nice chicken soup, and a potato chip or two (why do salty things taste so good when the stomach flu descends?), but dining out was not a favored event.
And then, too, rain poured down, torrential and limiting. We went to the national park and enjoyed the Visitors Center, but a day hike was out of the question; some trails were closed, and the Park officials recommended against trekking on others in all the wet. So we read about the Park; remembered the Cuyahoga River burning in 1969, and how that event, combined with others, led to 1970's changes: to Earth Day, to stronger legislation, to measures we wish now had been deeper-reaching, more effective.
Those seventies, again.
We drove back to the airbnb and researched a little; we found ANOTHER cool bookstore in a town not far away.
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And so I we spent an afternoon in Shelf Life, a used bookshop on the bottom floor of an arts complex in Cuyahoga Falls. We couldn't find it at first, wandered up and down a city block trying to locate the address. Finally, we asked a young man; he'd been kind of rushing by, but he stopped and smiled; he walked us right to the building's entrance and pointed out which door to take to find our destination.
And we went down the stairs to a winding hallway and discovered a little gem of a place. Outside the door to Shelf Life, there's a shelf full of free books; James' eyes lit up when he saw some James Clavell tomes. He picked those up, and then we went in.
The store's rough walls are painted purple; the floor is carpeted. Shelf Life is completely and utterly CLEAN; the books are beautifully organized, and the woman who runs the shop is friendly, interested, and interesting…and the kind of bookstore owner who will only offer suggestions that you ask for. On a wooden beam that bolsters the shop's ceiling, she has hung things found in books—notes and postcards, receipts, invoices, a vast array of fascinating bookmarks.
On the day we visited, she had unearthed a ticket stub to a Sinead O'Connor concert and tacked it up on the beam.
Adult books were a buck; kids' books were fifty cents, or, sometimes, a quarter. We filled two big bags, one for James, and one for Mark and me. We stocked up on books for the Little Free Library.
And one of those books was by Crescent Dragonwagon.
Crescent Dragonwagon! I remember her early children's books from my days working at a friend's family's bookshop back in the seventies. It was the kind of shop that had a sign outside that read, "Browsers Welcome," and it was the kind of job where the bosses encouraged us to take books home and read them, the better to be able to help customers find what they need.
Okay, we said, not at all reluctant, and I read in between the required readings for college, read and read, because, after all, it was a work obligation, right?
And I looked through the children's books. Crescent Dragonwagon's stood out because of that new age-y name, and the engaging titles, and the dreamy illustrations. She was not an author I ever interested Matt or James in; her works are kind of ruminant, introspective, poetic. But now, I grabbed up the copy of Home Place, and the gate holding back memories of seventies-read books (even though Home Place was published later) came bursting open. My mind flickered and filled with thoughts of Herman Wouk and Marilyn French, Rumer Godden, Mary Gordon, Sylvia Plath, Rosamund Pilcher. Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee bobbed up to the surface; Love Story and Jonathan Livingston Seagull nudged their ways in: books that touched me when I read them, working at that store.
You could, I thought, write your life's memoir framed by the books you'd read, decade by decade. You could list them and think about them and figure out what they said to you, and who you were when you first read those words.
Book memories overwhelmed me. We left that store and went to a tavern across the street. The ice water there was very, very good.
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My car sits under some trees, often; the shade is a boon—no achingly hot seats or dashboard for the return trip.
But the trees do something. Spit? When I go out to drive home, my windows and doors are speckled with tiny, sticky little dots. The car needs a good scrub.
James and I went out one day this week on some necessary errands—a carton of milk, a stop at the bank for James, and, I thought, I'd stop and get the car washed. It was a brilliantly sunny, brilliantly hot afternoon, and, errands complete, I suddenly decided NOT to turn into the car wash.
I will, I realized, just wash the car myself.
I surprised myself with that decision, but it seemed like the utterly right thing to do on that baking summer day.
And so we went home and unpacked our packages, and I changed into t-shirt and shorts. I filled a plastic bucket with warm, soapy water, and I found a bag of soft old rags. I unspooled the hose, slapping out the kinks, and then I hosed the car down, and scrubbed it from roof to wheel wells, hosed all the soapiness off, and dried it tenderly.
And as I did all that, more sense memories rose: washing my Dad's powder blue Pontiac in the driveway of the house on Willowbrook, the neighbor boy coming out and threatening me with a shower as he washed HIS car. My father surveying the finished car, perhaps pointing out a dot-speckled window, but mostly, finding it good.
Helping a friend scrub the van he drove, working at the local radio station. His frail grandfather walking gingerly over to show me one of his prized roses, the size of a pumpkin, almost.
Cut off jeans shorts and soggy t-shirts, rainbows in the spray from the hose.
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These things happened in the seventies, of course. Yes, Universe; I hear you.
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Probably the fact that I am heading to my fifty high school reunion--class of 1973--early next month explains why the portal keeps opening, the seventies memories flooding in. Those memories are insistent and demanding even as we live through the hottest days in world record, one day surpassing the next, and some people in some places in real danger from extreme heat.
I need, I think, to slow down and consider, to listen to what the Universe is saying, to what I really need to hear. There are memories that break my heart, and memories that warm it, and maybe, there are memories there that point to a pathway it might be good, right now, to walk.
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Be careful what you eat, my friend. A hearty helping of, say, pepper steak can open a portal that's very, very tough to close.
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Recipe image from Pinterest
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