How to Roast a Lamb_ New Greek Classic Cooking - Michael Psilakis [29]
In the same way my father’s single objective in life was to provide for his family, my mother’s mission was to nurture and feed her family—both literally and figuratively—so that when we sat down to our table as a family each and every night of the week, each and every day of the year, she was feeding our bodies, our hearts, and our minds to keep us together, to reinforce the value of family and our interconnectedness.
My mother was a perfectionist, and it was her passion for food and cooking that enabled her to bring and hold us all together. Whether it was at our family dinners or the countless family parties and celebrations that we hosted in our home, my mother would cook for hours, and sometimes for days, to feed everyone with the very best she could make. This was her arena, and while my father’s role as provider defined him in our family, to a certain extent these family dinners defined my mother’s role as the matriarch of our family.
Dinner was the one time each day it was guaranteed that the whole family would be together. It did not matter what time my father got home from work. We always waited for him so that we could sit down to eat as a family. While as a child I didn’t understand them as such, I now know that these dinners were my mother’s gift to us. The time, energy, and passion she put into them defined us as a family.
It was clear to me that missing one night of family dinner would not make my mother angry, but, far worse, it would wound her in a way that would cause her pain in the depths of her soul. To miss one of those dinners would signify to her that whatever else I was doing was more important than she was, more important than my family, and more important than her singular wish to keep us together.
Even at the worst of times, when I was a rebellious teenager with a Mohawk haircut, multiple earrings, and an attitude to match the look, despite a strong desire to do otherwise, I respected and honored my mother by showing up at her table. Through good times and bad, the conversations ranged from lively and animated to all-out shouting matches, but we were all there, together. To my mother, that was what mattered. We would weather the storms and emerge the way she intended: as a family.
I can say without a doubt that my passion for food comes from my mother. I can remember, when I was a young boy of about four, my mother sitting me at our kitchen table in front of a sea of foot-long strips of phyllo dough and a bowl of cheese filling and enlisting me to help her with the tiropitas (little filled triangles). Not big enough to see over the table from a seated position, I would kneel on a chair to gain enough altitude to do my job. One by one, I would spoon a scoop of cheese at the end of each two-inch-wide strip and fold the phyllo over into a triangle, flip-flopping from one side of the phyllo rectangle to another, very similar to the paper football triangles I would later fold during class in grammar school, (mostly) escaping the detection of watchful teachers. After folding each strip until there was no dough left, I would place each tiropita on a tray and start again on the next one, until I had folded each of the dozens of strips that had once obscured the entire table.
The meatballs we made as children might have been a way for my mother to occupy some of her energetic brood while she cooked, but at the same time she was teaching us and sharing her passion for cooking with us. I felt proud when I stood by my mother’s side and rolled those meatballs and prouder still when my meatballs were good enough to go into the pot. But they were not good enough to be indistinguishable from my mother’s. When we sat down to dinner with my father, I would always try to find mine in the pot so I could show him what I had done, how well I had done it—what I had learned from my mother.
I think the best illustration of my mother’s passion for her cooking, her level of dedication to feed her family to the best of her ability, and the