How to Eat: Lessons From My Mother

About author / Amy Powell

World traveler; gourmet 30 minute meals; lover of exotic ingredients; winner on FoodTV's Chefs vs City; graduate French Culinary Institute. Her recipes will tantalize your taste buds.

In some ways, everything I know about eating my mother taught me. Like most people, it was my mother who brought the first food to my mouth. She started with breast milk and as I grew, she slowly introduced solid foods, one new taste at a time. Eventually I found my place at the table eating grownup food alongside my brother, father and mother, every night together, as a family.

In a way, my mother was ahead of her time (I often say she was "whole foods" before there was Whole Foods). Frequently we accompanied her to the local health food store where she would stock up on dried beans, bulgar, and brown rice. If we behaved in the store we might find a bag of yogurt covered raisins or unsweetened banana chips waiting for us as a reward.

Then there were the occasional pilgrimages to a nearby town where my mother would take the large white bin that normally sat beneath our kitchen counter to have it refilled with a mountain of whole-wheat grains. My brother and I liked to run our hands through the silky seeds while our mother scooped out cups to run through a mill. The ground flour would go on to become the malty fresh bread she baked for us weekly.

Little did I know that bread making, one of my mother’s passions, would put her life in danger. When I was eleven she became seriously ill. Always slim, her weight dropped dramatically as she was unable to keep food from passing through. After months of doctors and testing it was determined she had celiac disease, a condition where gluten, the protein in found in wheat flour, destroys the lining of the small intestine.

Gone were the freshly baked cinnamon rolls on the weekend. When pasta was on the menu at our family dinners, my mother would cook spaghetti for us and then spoon her Bolognese over a dish of rice. My mother had to adapt to her new diet and we adapted with her, swapping rice for pasta, corn tortillas for flour.

With the loss of gluten, there was also a sense of discovery. I remember us listening to a cooking show on the radio one day. This was how we discovered risotto (a naturally gluten-free food at the time found nowhere near our small Southern California home). Once we tracked down the Arborio rice we set up to make risotto in every fashion, from simple risotto with white wine and Parmesan to more complicated versions with pureed roasted red peppers.

Over the years as the market for health food caught up with my mother’s condition, we both took joy in finding quinoa in its many forms and the happy news that soba is made with buckwheat, also gluten-free. To this day, I’ll occasionally call her when I find something new to me, like a particularly excellent gluten-free flour, in the belief that even without gluten her food experiences should continue to be rich and exciting.

Today as I watch many of my friends welcome their first and second children into the world, I know they have a big task ahead. Not all of them were lucky enough to have nightly family dinners and mothers who shopped at the health food store. But they, like our mothers before us, are their child’s first introduction to the complex relationship with food that we have as humans. It is something that brings pleasure but we also need it live. We need it to live, but it can, on occasion be a threat to our very existence.

Some days food for me is all about pleasure, to the point of over indulgence. Other days it is simply about sustenance, but even then, always in a form that is as tasty and healthy as possible. The wonder of discovery in new foods and ultimately, the respect for what goes in my body and where it came from, that is what my mother taught me. It is a lesson I will never forget.

Serves/Makes: 4

• 4 soft shell crabs, cleaned
• 2 cups milk
• 1 stick butter
• 2 cups chicken broth or water
• 1 cup red quinoa
• 1/2 tablespoon butter
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 1 clove garlic, lightly crushed
• 1 tablespoon sherry vinegar
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 1/4 teaspoon black pepper
• 1/2 cup fine ground cornmeal
• 1/2 cup rice flour
• 1 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 1 teaspoon fresh ground black pepper
• 1/2 teaspoon Dijon mustard
• 3 tablespoons olive oil
• 3 cups arugula