The funnest person I get to talk to right now is my three-year old niece. Conversations are about eating, playing and sleeping. We don’t always agree, but she’s a grand diversion from the junk that comes out of the mouths of adults today who get paid millions to say it. When she speaks – she’s so articulate already –, she makes sense, although I never would have thought of her comebacks.
My main role lately is to pick her up from school once in a while. I’m the emergency back-up to her care system as I live just a forty-minute walk away from my brother and his family. While I see her a lot outside of school, she doesn’t know me as a regular caretaker.
Some days when she peeks out the door of her school, she looks like she’s thinking, “Really? Where’s my daddy?”
Then she says it, “I want daddy.”
Sometimes her eyes get red, and the tears come. Then her teacher gives her chocolate.
At dinner with her parents one night, I asked, “What happened today when I picked you up from school?”
“I cried,” she said.
“Then what happened?”
“I cried to my teacher.”
“Then what happened.”
A smile spread across her face as she said, “I got chocolate.”
That was the last time I thought I was in charge.
I walk over to their home for dinner often on the weekends.
The plan for dinner one night had been to make noodles which means I have to do something when I get there. I make the dough with flour and eggs and olive oil. My brother rolls it into thin sheets with an old fashioned hand-cranking pasta machine clamped to the counter top. In the final step, my niece and I cut the sheets of dough into tonnarelli on the chitarra.
Chitarra means guitar in Italian. The wires of the chitarra for cutting the noodles are strung like the strings of a guitar. And they do make music.
She asks, “Can I make the music now?”
We finally were getting close to throwing the noodles in the pot, when my brother asked my niece, “What do you want for dinner? Pasta? Chicken nuggets? Macaroni and cheese?”
“Pasta?” he repeated, hoping to bias her choice.
“Pancakes. Blueberry pancakes.”
Pancakes weren’t on the dinner menu.
“You’re sure?” her daddy asks.
“Yes.”
She’s a typical toddler when it comes to food. Her teacher tells my brother and his girlfriend that she eats everything at school, but my niece’s mother wants video proof. So when she asks for something specific to eat, my brother makes it. Watching her, I often wonder how meal time went down around the prehistoric camp fire.
If the food comes out of a package, there’s a better chance she will eat it. The frustration for my brother, for parents, is to make a positive connection with food for his daughter in today’s world. Fruit gets pressed and molded into shapes that don’t resemble the real thing. The resultant color isn’t even appetizing most of the time, but the reimagined fruit now comes in a bright package with some kind of prize. It’s not unhealthy, it’s even a good snack, but it looks nothing like an apple or a mango.
You have to understand how my brother cooks. My brother is the guy who buys several pounds of fresh tomatoes at the farmers market and makes his own tomato sauce to go along with fresh made noodles. He’s also the guy who washes the dish or dishes in between each step of his cooking process.
My brother isn’t officially part of the slow food movement, the movement originating in Italy in opposition to the American fast food restaurants taking up space next to iconic Italian sites, but he could have been. The movement aspires to draw attention to all aspects that go into making food, from farming to the source, with an emphasis on local products, to how the food is prepared. I usually have a snack before I go over if I’m invited for dinner.
So when his daughter asks for blueberry pancakes in the middle of making pasta, it’s another process. The pasta dinner preparation came to a halt. He does use a pancake mix to make pancakes, but the mix requires adding milk and oil which has to be beat until smooth. The iron skillet has to be at the right temperature, and even though there’s enough space for more than one pancake at a time, he makes one pancake at a time, adding in the blueberries after pouring in a few tablespoons of the batter. They’re cooked until just brown and the blueberries ooze a little bit.
He doesn’t cook the pancakes all at once. He staggers them, bringing a hot-off-the-griddle pancake to my niece only after she’s finished with the last one.
With the first pancake, my niece asked for syrup. My brother poured her some syrup on the side because she prefers to dip and swirl the triangular cut pieces of pancake in it. Or to pluck out the blueberries first. She has her own process. I think, maybe she has inherited more than just her eyebrows from her father.
After a few bites, my three-year old niece, her fingers wrapped in cartoon covered bandaids, said, “These are the best pancakes.”
She took another bite. “DaDa, you’re my favorite guy. I love you.”
The lines in his forehead disappeared as a smile took over his face.
Our own father, a surgeon, did cook for us, although his primary role in the kitchen was to grocery shop. He drove downtown to the markets in Chicago to buy fruit and vegetables wholesale or the bakery for bread, and cut and ground up meat, and boned chickens for freezing. More process. He didn’t cook much, except if it was to roast a pig, which is a whole other story, or microwave the trout caught by my brothers at a local reserve. There’s nothing that will get people out of the kitchen faster than fish cooking in a microwave.
“How can you eat those fish?” I would ask.
“Because I paid for them,” he said.
He grew up wondering where his next meal was going to come from. I did not.
The more edible concoctions my father made had a distinct ethnic flavor originating from his Sicilian heritage. I loved the days when he made us a Sicilian dish for breakfast or meatless Fridays – scrambled eggs with tomato sauce, and asparagus or artichoke, garlic and parmigiano.
By the end of dinner that night, my niece had eaten five pancakes and a bowl of homemade noodles. Heavily carb weighted meal (carbs get a bad rap because of how we cook them and what we put on them, in my opinion), but everything eaten was homemade without a side of tantrums.
Blueberry pancakes, a recipe for peace?
Books…
Norwegian Lessons in Indonesia (2023)
An Accidental Artist: Discovering Creativity through Scuba Diving (2018)
Art for sale at AnemoneWatch on Square
Janice Nigro 
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