My younger daughter, a sophomore in college, is spending the last days of her Spring Break with me in Northern California. While in route from her friend’s home in Reno, she starts texting me with requests: vanilla flavored coffee creamer, a favorite beverage, and calzone for dinner.
I first encountered calzone while on a charted sailboat in the Puget Sound. Long before either daughter’s arrival into this world, their father and I had booked a vacation with our best friends that involved a sailing ship, a crew, and the San Juan Islands. Also beer. The crew was a husband and wife team that was an extraordinary combination of opposites. He loved the ocean and the sailing. She loved the farm and animal tending. They took turns living in each other’s world. In the warm season they offered themselves and their boat out as a charter. In the rainy Pacific Northwest winters, they tended the farm. He piloted the boat and she pulled the most extraordinary meals out of kitchen that was two feet by two feet at best. This was 1982 and she used the Moosewood Cookbook.
One of the first things I did when I got back to shore was to find a copy of that cookbook.
I fell in love with the handwritten recipes, the art and the doodles on each page. I started to see how food was more than just something on the table but something that was worthy of attention and care in its creation.
While I did most of the cooking, my husband developed his own specialties such as anything on the Weber, lasagna, and the calzone from Moosewood. When the marriage ended, one of the things I needed to relearn was how to make calzone for myself and for my daughters. It was important to do this because the Moosewood calzone is one of my favorite comfort foods and damned if I was going to loose that too. It was a year of multiple losses. Too many, just too many got lost that year.
The Moosewood calzone is bread dough that is set to rise. It is onions and garlic chopped together and sautéed in butter. It is mozzarella and parmesan shredded and ricotta mixed in. It is fresh spinach steamed to wiltedness. It is all of this combined with a touch of salt and nutmeg and scooped out onto dough, rolled out into a circle. The dough is folded over and a fork is used to crimp the edges together and then to poke the initials of the one it is intended for. Your cardiologist does not recommend this for your diet but it is soul satisfying goodness.
The years have seen changes. Once we grated the mozzarella by hand, then we froze it a bit and used the Cuisinart. In the losses of the divorce, I left the food processor behind and went back to hand grating till I got the Kitchen-Aid mixer attachment. We usually made this on a Sunday night, and we’d often start it when we were already a bit hungry. We’d grab greedily at the bits of cheese as it came off the grater. The girls were especially skilled at anticipating that little bowl of gratings that would tide them over until the whole exited from the oven.
I’ve used skim milk mozzarella, smoked mozzarella and now whole milk mozzarella. I’ve used spinach and kale. Once, I left out the ricotta by mistake and it was still yummy goodness. Did I mention that you butter the outside of the oven-hot calzone before you make your first cut with a fork?
I relearned to make the Moosewood calzone for myself and the girls when they spent their week with me. It was a custodial arrangement that seemed like the best of an awful situation, a week with me and week with their father. At least the food could remain the same. Then I left town to go to seminary and they or I flew to see each other once a month. If I had access to a kitchen, I made calzone. I made lasagna. I made food for them, for us where ever we found ourselves in each other’s company.
I have remarried and am blessed to enjoy the presence of adolescent step-sons, the elder of whom is now about to step out into the world on his own. I don’t make calzone as often as I once did. For a while, elder stepson didn’t eat cheese. (!) Younger stepson just looks at all the spinach and leaves a mostly uneaten mess of bread and vegetable on his plate. Their father hates onions so constructing a calzone involves additional steps that keep his meal pure. Finally, and most true, this new family does not share the deep history of the calzone meal. It’s okay with me because we’re learning new recipes that say “family” in a different way. (Enchiladas - especially as everyone now embraces dairy products. Think of enchiladas mostly as a carrier for sour cream.)
My elder daughter is now grown and living in Washington D.C. She called me a year or so ago, delighted to tell me that she had found a copy of the Moosewood Cookbook and had made her own calzone. I look forward to someday sitting at her table and eating her calzone. I’m probably going to feel old.
In the meantime, younger daughter text-messages me from somewhere between Reno and Martinez asking for calzone for dinner tonight. “See,” she tells her friend now seated next to her at table - the friend who is traveling with her - “I told you this is really good.”
How does this relate to faith? I sometimes think our celebration of Communion is too austere, too calvinistic, too… antiseptic. I sometimes think we should have Communion with great big piles of food, comfort food, the food that comes with love and memory stirred in alongside the salt, the spices, the goodness. I think we should be serving the Moosewood Cookbook’s version of calzone alongside the bread and the wine - or whatever food it is that tells you of Home. I think we should remember that what Jesus is offering to us, really is food. Nourishing, comforting, real food. Eat this food, eat this memory and rejoice in each other’s presence. It is all good gift from the One who desires our presence at the Table of God. It’s really good.
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Anitra Kitts is a freelance writer and Candidate for Ministry of the Word and Sacrament. She lives and cooks in Northern California.
YUMMMMMMM-O! Thanks for sharing your delicious thoughts, Anitra. I miss you!
Posted by: Stephanie C | March 31, 2009 at 03:45 PM