sense of belonging Archives

Mana’s Kitchen, Bay City, Oregon

On June 25, 2021

In-house baked scones at Mana’s Kitchen (Image by Penwhisk)

On Tuesdays, Mana’s Kitchen in Bay City opens at 9 a.m. I looked at my watch; it was only 8:30 a.m. Deciding to take a chance, we dialed their number. Our reward was an amiable male voice on the other end of the line. Yes, they were open for business. No, they didn’t serve pancakes on Tuesdays, only for Saturday brunch. However, they did have in-house baked scones and croissants. For lunch, they would make croissant sandwiches with chicken salad; those loyal to Mana’s Kitchen would drive for miles to savor them.

The agreeable voice called out in a direction away from the phone:

“Are we getting any greens today?” Turning back to us, he shared his news:

“There’ll also be salad.”

We inquired how long the drive to Mana’s Kitchen was from where we were staying.

“An hour. You want to stop at Whalen Island on the way. It’s pretty close to where you are. I make sure that everyone who visits us at Mana’s Kitchen knows to stop at Whalen Island. It’s a special kind of place.”

Trillium Natural Foods, Lincoln City, Oregon

By Penwhisk

On May 30, 2021

In Journeys

Trillium Natural Foods (Image by Penwhisk)

My recent experience of Trillium Natural Foods in Lincoln City on the Oregon coast, made twentysomething years after I came to the US, threw into relief colorful strands in the weave of my Bulgarian-American identity.

I had learnt of co-op stores soon after my arrival in this country. I was having a conversation with Will, a fellow graduate student, about my plans for my first Christmas in the States. My Bulgarian roots held firmly to an idea of a strictly set traditional Bulgarian menu: vegetarian bean stew; rolls of pickled cabbage stuffed with rice and dill; and phyllo dough pastry filled with roasted pumpkin, walnuts, and raisins, sweetened with honey, and flavored with cinnamon and cloves. I quickly got immersed in a complicated and somewhat tangled explanation that I had preceded with the statement, “I don’t like the taste of beans and pickled cabbage, but I must have them at Christmas.” I followed this with a passionate description of the above dishes that the Bulgarian in me felt compelled to prepare pretty much from scratch.

Boris Fishman Savage Feast

By Penwhisk

On May 6, 2019

In Books

Beets, the main ingredient in Borshch, one of the dishes in Savage Feast. (Image courtesy of Congerdesign on Pixabay)

In his memoir with recipes Savage Feast, Boris Fishman tells stories about family meals and vexing conversations revolving around them. The meals are made up of dishes from the Belarusian Jewish heritage of his parents. The conversations test Fishman’s patience and ability to explain to his mom and dad from the ex-Soviet Union his aspirations as a young man who was born in Belarus but grown up in the USA. Most importantly of all, he is struggling to make understandable both to them and himself the issues in his protracted relationship with Alana, an American woman with whom he shares an “attraction that would make Gabriel García Márquez sit up,” but which unfortunately proves insufficient to sustain a satisfying long-term relationship.

Right in its prologue, Savage Feast sets up multiple questions that on a single weekend kept me reading right to the book’s very end. Would Fishman eventually reconcile his ex-Soviet immigrant heritage with his American identity? Would he be able to find a partner with whom he enjoys a healthy, harmonious relationship? And would he share at least one meal with his Belarusian Jewish family, savoring delicious dishes without being upset and disappointed at their inability to understand him?

I appreciated the honesty and directness with which Fishman relates his frustrations in the interactions with his parents. In my experience, Eastern European families don’t openly acknowledge problems and disagreements. This makes it close to impossible to resolve thorny issues and patterns of dysfunction. It falls on children to tackle troubling matters in order to clear the path to their own well-being. A lot is at stake here and I couldn’t resist gobbling up Savage Feast so that I could find out whether Fishman would succeed.

Parisian Food

By Penwhisk

On March 27, 2019

In Journeys

Image courtesy of Caroline Attwood on Unsplash

In my memory, Parisian food is wrapped up in a stream of rapid speech: agile words of which I miraculously manage to keep abreast even though they often try to get away from me and even gull me.

I’m in the ill-appointed kitchen of a student dorm in the fourteenth arrondissement of Paris. Around me are young people who chatter in a rapid flow, which makes my ears ring. They’re here not just to feed themselves, but to get some necessary social interaction: joke, tease, laugh, argue, negotiate or merely exchange information. I’m able to catch an occasional word here and there. The rest of the babble washes over my drowsy, jet-lagged brain. While I’m chopping my onions, I duck my head in an attempt to avoid eye contact in order to remain as unobtrusive as possible.

Right across from me, a young woman is putting together a salad. She has neatly braided hair and is wearing an impeccable cotton blouse. I watch her competent moves as she washes lettuce and tears it into pieces, then combines it with olives, hard-boiled eggs, fragrant tomatoes, and some fresh green beans. She is making a version of Salade Niçoise, which I soon learn is not really Parisian food. (In the early days of my stay in Paris, I lacked the right French words along with the cultural competence to identify this.) A fine art deco gold ring with a carnelian stone on one of her supple fingers catches my eye. I fill in the blanks that my insufficient French throws right in my face with information gleaned from my neighbor’s appearance: an upper-middle-class fresh-food-connoisseur for sure, an experienced cook who shares my interest in artisan early-twentieth-century objects. A smile flutters over my lips while a group of fellows bursts out laughing. It doesn’t really matter that we are cheery for different reasons: it still looks as if I have understood enough to join in their merriment.

Bulgarian beans and lentils

By Penwhisk

On January 21, 2019

In Journeys

Stuffed zucchini at Hemingway restaurant in Plovdiv
Image by Penwhisk

There must be a mistake. I am standing in front of a restaurant in the center of Plovdiv, reading through the menu. My eyes move hungrily from line to line looking for a dish of Bulgarian beans and lentils. There is none that I can see. That is hard to understand. Beans and lentils were at the heart of my grandmother’s cooking. For me, they are indispensable to Bulgarian national cuisine. In my disbelief, I seek help from a young waiter, who happens to be standing by. He raises his eyebrows:

“Bulgarian beans and lentils? No one has ever asked me for those, not that I can remember. We have grilled meats, kebapche, fish, shopska salad, as well as cucumber salad with yogurt and walnuts. This is what people want to eat. No one goes out for Bulgarian beans and lentils.”

My mother is standing at a safe distance a couple of steps behind me. I sense her embarrassment. When I join her, she looks at me.

“Don’t you realize that asking for Bulgarian beans and lentils comes across as an insult? Bulgarian taste has risen in sophistication above beans and lentils. They are a thing of the impoverished communist past. Why do you always want to provoke? Must you come back home after ten years and make people uncomfortable with your unsettling questions?”

Bulgarian Mineral Water

By Penwhisk

On November 1, 2018

In Journeys

Image courtesy of Jonathan Chng on Unsplash

After fifteen years, not much seems to have changed on the Sofia – Plovdiv railway line. Still, things look strange to me in an unsettling way. I cannot help but feel as though at the Iskarsko Shosse stop, a short subway ride away from Sofia airport, I have caught a train well-known to me from my childhood. The cars are reassuringly grimy and grungy.

I am thirsty. My eyes are drawn to the trash receptacle in my compartment, which swells with crushed, empty Bulgarian mineral water bottles. The names of springs flash through my head: Hisarya, Bansko, Devnya, Sandanski, Sapareva Banya, Varshets. In the early days of Bulgaria’s market economy, firms sprang up that introduced plastic bottles, previously known to locals mostly from pictures of the West, filled with Bulgarian mineral water from these springs. In their advertisements, the firms claimed that Vanga, a blind Bulgarian mystic and seer, had blessed their product.

Vanga’s abilities to foretell people’s destinies had been in much demand during communist times. While religion had been officially forbidden, belief in the supernatural was tolerated. Folks waited for months on end for a turn to visit the vrachka in Petrich, a small town in Southern Bulgaria. Their repertoire of questions was of a personal nature, for no one dared to inquire about the future of Bulgarian communist politics: Would a relative find relief from a prolonged, mysterious illness? Who would have a boy after years of trying? Who would marry at long last, and who would return from an extended, distant journey? Sitting on the Sofia — Plovdiv train now, I am craving for a bottle of Bulgarian mineral water. I very much need a reading of my past rather than the future: Did I never belong here?

Cooking with Yotam Ottolenghi

By Penwhisk

On June 6, 2018

In Books

Apricot and Walnut Cake by Yotam Ottolenghi (Image by Penwhisk)

Complicated is my relationship with Yotam Ottolenghi, the eminent Israeli-British chef, owner of notable culinary establishments in London and author of award-winning cookbooks. Ottolenghi and I have never met and we appear to be at very different stages in life. Currently, I am a stay-at-home mom and house-wife, an occupation, which, going by the look on the faces of those with whom I share this piece of information, makes me neither capable nor accomplished. I have won no awards as a stay-at-home mom. (This is fortunate, for I associate such distinctions with the Mother’s Cross of Honor, given to women in Hitler’s Nazi Germany.) Nonetheless, there are some things that Ottolenghi and I have in common. Firstly, both of us hold advanced degrees in Comparative Literature — he a M.A. and I, a Ph.D. Plenty More is the second thing we share. He wrote it and I must have used it cooking at least 150 times in the past year.

Sugar Cookies

By Penwhisk

On March 22, 2018

In Journeys

Image courtesy of Austin Ban on Unsplash

The Bulgarian communist production system had its own version of the 1970s sugar cookie. The sugar cookies of my childhood came in a clear plastic bag with blue and red letters in the Cyrillic alphabet, which said something about zoo animals. I’m certain that there was a hippopotamus and a monkey, maybe even a giraffe and a kangaroo. The rest of the animal shapes I don’t remember. Despite being a fan of these cookies, I have no recollection of their taste. I enjoyed holding them in my tiny hands and running my finger over their surface to feel the texture. The animal shape was the sole effort to appeal to the consumer that the communist centrally planned production system made. The cookies had a neutral scent and the pale color of slightly under-cooked dough didn’t tempt me. My goal was to get hold of as many cookies as possible so that I could arrange them and keep them away from my brother, who was known to devour anything, regardless of its taste.

Milk

By Penwhisk

On March 7, 2018

In Plenty

Image courtesy of Josua De on Unsplash.

At every breakfast I had as a child in Koprivshtitsa, my grandparents insisted that I had my cup full of milk. The milk came directly from the barn of one of my grandmother’s close acquaintances. It was unpasteurized and non-homogenized, and my grandparents boiled it twice to minimize the risk of getting sick. No communist factory had messed this milk up. It had not been watered down or processed to kill contamination. Neither had it been forced through tubes, poured into dull-looking plastic packaging and sealed shut, so that a grumpy seller could slam down this product of the communist economy in front of a customer, addressing him or her as “comrade.” A comrade who might as well have been number 57 in line. Five more customers served and the rest of the comrades waiting would be turned away to head home empty-handed.

A graduate student’s first Thanksgiving celebration in the United States

By Penwhisk

On January 24, 2018

In Holidays

Image courtesy of Cala on Unsplash

Thanksgiving wasn’t part either of my childhood or adolescence. Neither does the idea of making a turkey, which I believe requires considerable talent and skill, tempt me. I do have a soft spot for Thanksgiving in my heart though and await this holiday with childlike excitement.

The first time I ever heard of Thanksgiving was in a short story “Two Thanksgiving Day Gentlemen” by the writer O’Henry. In the story, a homeless man is generously fed, first by two well-off New York ladies and then, by an old gentleman. Both the homeless and the gentleman end up in the hospital, the homeless from overeating and his benefactor from starvation. I could well relate to the idea of not having much to eat. In communist Bulgaria, where I grew up, grocery stores had empty shelves and common folks lined up for staples such as flour, eggs, and milk.

Food with a Slice of History

Tag: sense of belonging

Mana’s Kitchen, Bay City, Oregon

Trillium Natural Foods, Lincoln City, Oregon

Boris Fishman Savage Feast

Parisian Food

Bulgarian beans and lentils

Bulgarian Mineral Water

Cooking with Yotam Ottolenghi

Sugar Cookies

Milk

A graduate student’s first Thanksgiving celebration in the United States