The First Thing I Learned to Cook/ By Halley Archbold, Dahlia Line Cook
Most of my favorite childhood memories take place next to my mother in our warm, narrow kitchen. I’ve been cooking with her since I was tall enough, with the help of a worn, wooden stool, to reach the counter tops. I’m still not sure what I learned to cook first, maybe her sweet spaghetti sauce, tangy chicken picatta, or our Christmas morning tradition of corned chipped beef. The most vivid memory, and the one that has come in handy more times than I can count, is Pesto Days.
Pesto Days are called such because it was a day long process. I have made pesto so many times as a cook, and I know that it hardly takes more than ten minutes, but with my mother it was an event. We would wake up early on a summer morning, hop into the Volvo, and head down to River Road in Puyallup. It’s lined with a patchwork of farms and vegetable stands with the season’s best advertised in hand painted signs. My mother and I would pull into her favorite, Terry’s Berries, a large stand with a myriad of fresh fruit, flowers, veggies, and herbs. I would run around poking and prodding, picking up gourds and stalks. The smell of hot ground and produce sends me back there no matter where I am. Mama would talk to the owners, people she had undoubtedly created relationships with from years of being a loyal patron. We would leave a sack of random things that I had picked out, and two or three overflowing paper grocery bags of fragrant, sweet basil.
Waiting at home there was a huge block of Parmesan to be grated and a bag of pine nuts (or sunflower seeds when money was tight) that she had gotten from Costco the day before. We would pull out the ancient food processor, some lemons, and the olive oil and go to work. We would stuff the basil into the processor with the cheese on top. After painstakingly peeling countless cloves of garlic and tossing them in the mix, we’d slowly add the lemon juice, pine nuts, salt, and finally the oil until the pesto was “done.”
I’d always ask her how many nuts went in, or how much cheese she used, and I would always get an answer that still rings throughout the kitchen at home and here at Dahlia: “Until it’s good, until it’s done.” This would repeat itself for hours, interrupted only by iced coffee breaks in the back yard and toasting bread for samples. The house would be filled with the scent of fresh basil and toasty pine nuts for what seemed like a week.
Our freezer would suddenly be filled with all shapes and sizes of Tupperware filled with the delicious green paste. Whenever we thawed a container, my mind would blissfully float back to our wonderful summer ritual. Thankfully that memory has stuck with me, and every time I make pesto for the Tuscan Bread Salad, a smile creeps across my lips and I think of my favorite days, Pesto Days.
(Editor’s notes: this is the 7th entry in our staff blog contest, “The First Thing I Learned to Cook.”
Photos courtesy “Terry’s Berries” website)
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