Something about supper on the weekend always takes me back to childhood. Tonight, I'm making risotto and pan-fried tilapia fillets with lemon juice and olive oil and a bit of dried oregano from my father's garden in Greece. Gabriel likes fish, when he turned three he requested salmon for his birthday dinner. Jacob will only eat it fried, with lots of tartar sauce. Grace will probably make herself an egg sandwich. I get it, fish is not to everyone's taste.
My husband Dan talks of growing up eating fish sticks on Fridays -- his dad was in charge of supper while his mom did the weekly grocery store run in town and treated herself to Chinese food for dinner, her one night "off" from parenting a large family -- apparently it didn't go over so well.
My Dad used to make my brother and I take the bones out of our own fish at dinnertime. He showed us how to cut along the edge, sliding the knife into the side of the fish, to open it up like a book. He took the heads and the tails -- he loved to chew around the bones -- and left the rest to us. Taking one end of the spine, we would peel it away from the meat and lift up the remaining bones with a knife, making sure to suck off any remaining bits of the lemony fish. They used to say that the cats in Athens didn't bother going to my family's residence, because there was no meat left on the bones. Clearly, we had learned well as we continued the tradition.
I always knew that the food we ate was not what you'd find on the dinner table at most of my friends' homes, where meat and potatoes were the mainstay and lasagna was considered a treat. Grocery stores weren't what they are today so it meant some extra effort to find the right ingredients. My mother would ask the grocer if he had any fresh parsley, and sometimes he would have a bunch out at the back, which he gave to her for free. The only place in town that you could buy feta and kalamata olives was at the Italian store. And I remember picking dandelion leaves with my mother and her friends from church, summer afternoons along the side of the main road near our house, before the newer subdivisions were built. I prayed to God that none of my friends would drive by and wonder why we were weeding public property. We collected bags of them, to be washed at home, then boiled and served with olive oil and lemon juice to take away the bitterness, together with the fish -- my dad's favourite meal: horta (dandelion leaves) and psari (fish).
My parents went to a Portuguese fish monger to buy whole fish, which he would clean for them, taking care to show them that the eyes were clear, not cloudy, testifying to the freshness. You couldn't buy that kind of freshness, or the variety, at a regular grocery store in those days, so going to the fish store was a special outing. Thursday evenings brought the latest catch, just in time for Friday supper. I thought it was something only immigrant families did -- in my hometown it was largely Greeks, Italians or Portuguese at the time -- so I was surprised one evening to see my sixth grade teacher there, her blond hair and blue eyes distinctly out of place in the smelly shop. A sense of relief washed over me, seeing her there...maybe we weren't so strange after all.
These days, I buy my fish frozen in fillets but have two kitchen drawers full of spices of every scent and flavour. I cook dishes of my Greek and Puerto Rican heritage, and also from all around the world: Italian, Indian, Chinese. We live in a neighbourhood that is a veritable United Nations. Feta and olives are standard fare at grocery stores across the country, Food Basics has an enormous "Foods of the World" section, and you even can buy njera at the local Quickie.
The kids are now taking turns making supper in our house, so on Sundays we're planning the week's meals. Up ahead this week: spaghetti and meatballs, a roast in the crock pot, and homemade pizza. Maybe this summer I'll take them out to pick dandelion leaves.
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