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Community Corner

Kitchen Lends Comfort When Times Get Tough

From soup to banana bread, this Royal Oak columnist finds — and shares — recipes to make the world a better place.

Not long ago, I read that Dr. Andrew Weil, best-selling author of Why Our Health Matters (Hudson Street Press), often prescribes regular fasts from national news.

Weil claims that bad news – especially the high-drama stories on television – literally can make us sick, and he says we need to take measures to shield ourselves.

As a journalist, I really can’t afford to practice regular fasting from the media. I have to find other ways to cheer myself — and to remind myself that the world is, for the most part, a safe and wonderful place.

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So when facts get stranger than fiction, I fire up the slow cooker and start making soup. Nobody is more surprised by this than I am.

From the fire into the frying pan

I came of age in the 1970s, when most young women did anything they could think of to stay out of the kitchen. In those days, I thought “dinner” was just another word for Chinese carry-out. One of my old roommates insisted that anything remotely domestic – even a bread machine – was an affront to the feminist movement. If an occasion called for brownies or a birthday cake, for instance, we drove to the nearest grocery and grabbed something sweet and neatly packaged from the bakery section.

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But my attitude shifted after my husband and I bought our first house in Royal Oak. 

Like most newlyweds, I quickly learned that cooking for two at home was more economical than dining out several times a week. Besides, that was back in the early '80s, before Royal Oak was dubbed the restaurant mecca of the Midwest. By the time our son was old enough to sit at our table, I'd started working from home and planning kid-friendly meals for three between deadlines. Martha Stewart be darned, our small kitchen had become one of my favorite rooms in the house.

In retrospect, this turn of events had a lot to do with the fact that kitchen work was also a creative escape from parenting and writing deadlines. Recipes were easier to manage than a cranky 3-year-old or an unruly paragraph. Sifting flour and breaking eggs felt soothing and Zen-like.

Before long, I’d amassed a collection of cookbooks, old and new. Even when I didn’t use them, their very presence on the shelf warmed the kitchen. Next, I started reading food essays at bedtime. I even fell in love with the tools of the craft – wire whisks, imported knives, durable cookware and beautiful glass mixing bowls. I grew to respect the mystical, nurturing powers of homemade food. 

When I first watched the footage of the Sept. 11 attacks on the World Trade Center, for instance, my first impulse was to warm the oven and make banana bread from scratch. As soon as the loaves cooled, I wrapped them in foil and delivered them to a few of my neighbors. At the time, sharing homemade bread was the only way I knew how to feel grounded while my country was blown apart.

Cooking in communion

Even today, I’m as fed by the process of baking and cooking as I am by the result. While I work, I’m in communion with other cooks who’ve stirred the same ingredients in the past. Their batter-stained recipes reconnect me to previous holiday meals, picnics, parties, banquets and potlucks. Good times.   

A whiff of vanilla, for instance, triggers happy memories of making sugar cookies on Christmas break with my mother. Straining chicken broth, I’m transported back to childhood and the aromatic Old World kitchen of a Ukrainian neighbor.  Kneading a ball of lumpy dough for scones, I recall my Scottish grandmother, a cheerful woman who understood that the best way to deal with the negative was to create something positive – even if it was only a buttery batch of shortbread or a soul-filling pot of barley soup. 

“It seems to me that our three basic needs, for food, security, and love, are so entwined that we cannot think of one without the other,” wrote food columnist and author M.F.K. Fisher.  

Which partly explains why I’ll be spending more time in the kitchen for the next few weeks.  

By the time you read this column, my mother will have returned home after recovering from surgery at and one of its nursing-center affiliates. I’ll be caring for her during the next few weeks, so one of my new challenges is to come up with heart-healthy meals that she’ll enjoy.

Once again, it’s time to head to the kitchen, chop vegetables, and stir up some comfort in the slow cooker.

Cindy La Ferle's award-winning story collection, Writing Home, is available on Amazon.com. Proceeds from the sales of new copies are donated to the day shelter in Royal Oak. For more information, visit Cindy La Ferle's Home Office.

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