Muy Caliente!

I was a no-spaghetti-sauce-for-me-thank-you kind of kid.

Despite the fact that my father makes this incredible homemade sauce, angelhair with margarine was my idea of culinary heaven for most of my childhood.

Ditto bread with butter.

Hamburgers and hotdogs were only acceptable if they were unadorned: no cheese, no relish, no ketchup, and certainly no mustard.

My cousin was even more of a purist; when she came to visit us when I was seven or so, I remember being dumbfounded by her professed dislike of mashed potatoes. How could anyone not like mashed potatoes?

In the land of Mommyblogs, there seems to be a fair amount of concern expressed about what kids will and won't eat. (Alice of Finslippy had a post last month about her son's refusal to eat practically anything and got 110 comments' worth of commiseration and advice. Not that I'm jealous or anything.)

I don't know if my own mother found my relatively narrow childhood dietary horizon constraining. (I rarely think to ask these sorts of questions, and when I do, she invariably says, "Oh, honey, I don't remember.") Probably she got very tired of serving me plain everything. And maybe I was darned lucky that she didn't snap and force some tomato sauce down my throat. But I don't remember her saying anything about it. And somehow, along the way from there to here, I learned to appreciate and enjoy food and spices from all over the globe; Ethiopian food, which I first learned to love in West Philadelphia, fresh eye-wateringly hot salsa which I probably first tried in college, fabulous curries from India which are thankfully plentiful here in central New Jersey. One of the main reasons I want to go back to Turkey someday is that I want another crack at that fabulous food.

Oh, and the little moments in my own kitchen, like the smell of fresh cilantro, crushed between my fingers as I get ready to make some fresh guacamole? It's 10:45 and now I'm hungry for lunch.

When I worked at The College of New Jersey, a school full of warm and interesting people that I enjoyed working with, I did have one complaint. I could never get anyone to go out for anything other than pizza or a burger. Sushi? Nothing doing. Thai? "Isn't that spicy?" Indian? Nope.

I feel about spice the way I feel about God. I wouldn't want a life without, but I think there's possibly no point in evangelizing. Either you're ready to take a test bite with your hand on a glass of water, or you're not. Either you feel a call to develop in a spiritual direction or you don't. As my famously wise sister says, "It's your job to put the food in front of them. It's not your job to make them eat it."

But I do believe that who you are today may have little recognizable connection to who you will be tomorrow. And that's the spice of life.

(Thanks to the women of Sunday Scribblings
for their continuing inspiration.)