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Pig is ready with the enchiladas.

Enchiladas are served.

And now, the hnt part:

Enchiladas are gone.

enchilar “1. to season with chiles; 2. (Mexico) to annoy; 3. to sting, burn.

A simple meal in the final execution, the preparation of enchiladas in my house was a labor of love. On a busy evening, it could be quick: a jar of sauce, pre-grated cheese, onion, whatever else was left to throw in, roll them up, stick them in the oven, and they were done. Sometimes, though, I made the sauce myself, boiling and scraping out the chiles, shredding the chicken (roasted–perhaps not traditional, but certainly tasty), softening the onions, nearly caramelized (again, maybe not traditional), before adding them to the cheese and chicken mixture, the mild peppers.

It was a meal that I had loved for a long time, and perfected during the Colorado years, in a land of hedonism and endless meal choices. It was there, watching Mexicans, many nearly invisible in the kitchens of a town many could barely afford to live in, that I was inspired to find the secrets. It was there, in the only affordable living space, a cheap deal in the land of plenty: the trailer court, that I first made enchiladas.

The trailer court was not my first choice for a home, snob that I was (well… not snob, to be honest: I was actually afraid of the trailer court). The trailer option did allow us to stay in town, and after a bit of arm-twisting, my then-husband convinced me that it did not have to be the place of tornadoes and dysfunction that I had grown up experiencing it to be. No, this was the West, not the Midwest, and things were different.

And different they seemed in those early days. I frolicked in the kitsch, put a clichéd pink flamingo out front, and started cooking. I became pregnant, blurred my doctoral dreams, nodded gazedly to the sudden move across the country. Boston. I was in hub heaven. I could still finish my work there, and made arrangements. My advisor said a class at Harvard could help me through the classical language requirement. Harvard! Imagine that.

The enchilada ingredients were harder to find, at least then, at least within walking distance of our house.

Fast forward several months. The baby was pushing to come out. Someone was asking me to sign something. A purchase and sale agreement was Fed-Exed to northern Vermont. “Why there?” you ask. Hell if I knew. I cannot even remember when I stopped asking those questions. The town we landed in was one of so many places where we picked up real estate brochures: Charlotte, Cheyenne, Guthrie, Belfast–at least this one was not a ranch. We could have landed anywhere, back in those days that any vacation could become the next home sweet home. Vermont seemed nice enough, though a bit lonely as the summer faded. I loved being in Boston. My then-husband enjoyed those pre-child moments, too, took long walks, played drums with a friend, went to car races with his brother on Saturday nights, tried to forget the doctorate he quit. No teaching work in Boston, he said, said we could not afford to stay, said we had to move. No job in Vermont, either, not for a long time. The house was a dream, a true beauty, the village isolated, dotted with dairy farms and cross country ski trails. Hard not to love, but to stay there? Babies came, many babies. I loved them well, loved them as if they were all I had. And maybe then, they were.

I was making enchiladas, my gloved hands dipping the tortillas into the sauce, then filling them with the chicken, cheese. Gloved hands—I had learned my lesson years earlier not to mess with chiles without some defense.

“What the hell are you doing?”

I was making dinner. I was cooking his favorite dinner, our favorite dinner, kids waiting, watching, wanting me to finish quickly. The oven was preheated, the side dishes were cooking, a salad waited on the table already.

“Those are gloves for cleaning toilets!”

I had two pair. The yellow ones for cooking, the blue for cleaning. Both were beneath the sink, on separate sides. Two pair: these were the yellow gloves.

“You are an unfit mother.”

He grabbed the dish from me and dumped the enchiladas into the trash. My older son yelled “NO!” while the others cried. I watched in horror as my husband, ‘till death do us part, ripped open hot dogs, baked beans, told the kids not to move. No one did. I saw the look in his eyes. I thought how I had bought the hot dogs the day before, at a grocery store seventeen miles away, thought how he was lucky there was something else to eat. My son said he wanted enchiladas, and I feared for the kid. He saw the look, too, bit into a hot dog, tears streaming down his face. I sat in the stairwell and sobbed, curled up as tight as I could, looking for a safe place, and there was none.

“If no one is going to eat, it’s bedtime.”

It was 6:30 pm. The kids did not argue, the four of them in the bath together. I went into their room, trying to put our life back together, convinced like so many other times, that it never really happened.

“What the hell are you doing here?”

My husband pushed me into our bedroom. I wanted to say goodnight to the kids. I heard myself protesting as he shut the door on me. I know I was yelling please. The key turned and locked.

“You are not safe to be around children,” he told me.

I thought maybe he was right about everything he said until then. I had told people I needed more help, found help. Four kids under six, one noticeably disabled. A woman came from the school, said we were a family, and had to work together. I cried. He was busy, I told her, had to leave early in the morning, and was tired at night. I was trying. She said I was a great mom. How could I believe what she said, if what he said was true? I begged for help. He told me I was telling everyone our business. I found help, strong women who helped me, who glanced knowing looks first at one another–then at me. He hated the invasion of privacy. I thanked God for the help. He said I was lazy, an unfit mother. I had tried to be better, but trying was never enough, never would be. I stopped making enchiladas, and the love in my heart seemed gone forever.

We moved once more–my choice this time. He gave me one present that last year we spent together. It was a pig.

The pig was a baking dish, made in Chile. It was shown in the Williams-Sonoma catalogue with enchiladas in it, he said. He asked me why I never made them anymore. Until I started the process I once loved, I had forgotten why myself. I never did find those gloves.

Last week, though, I did find the pig on top of my kitchen shelves, never used. I went to the grocery store yesterday, and bought the tortillas, the cheese, chiles. I have it all, watched the kids devour something similar at a Mexican restaurant not so long ago. They are ready for this kind of meal, and at last, so am I. Tonight I am making enchiladas.

The last straw is when we run out of milk. No cereal. No healthy teeth and bones. No decaf lattes from that beautiful Expobar sitting in my kitchen.

So, having managed to get my son on the school bus for the fifth time since his hospital stay, I celebrated by heading to the grocery store.

Now, before I continue on down to the corner market, a bit of an aside. I hesitate, although only slightly, in revealing this much here, of all places. I mean, I have to wonder if there is a feeling of shock and dismay—or worse, pity—at the idea that I cannot get my older son to go to school many days because of his mental health issues. He is smart (which is how he still managed to get on the honor roll), funny, and not noticeably impaired when things are in the right balance… Still, I have found it much more difficult to bring myself to talk about him than it is about his brother, whose disability is developmental, intellectual, obvious—and not stigmatized in nearly the same way. Ah, but in not talking about the bipolar stuff, I stigmatize, too.

Stigma is a term that fits well when you consider the Latin/Greek origin: “tattoo indicating slave or criminal status”. I wish I could say that things have changed much in our world today. On the contrary, I find that when my son with developmental disabilities missed nearly thirty days of school a few years ago, it was at the insistence of the school staff that he stay home because they could not do anything with him. For my son with mental health issues, though, numerous absences (despite the school’s patience and help) may quickly become a legal matter, a crime… like so many other things. A psychiatric admission to the hospital is nearly impossible without entrance through the emergency room, and for so many, a call to 911 following an act of violence, self-injury, vandalism. A crime… but in these cases, a desperate plea for help, an acute illness demonstrated in frightening ways. What more can we do?

There is attention to this problem, but also resistance. Many posts ago, I mentioned a neighborhood’s resistance to a group home for adults with a Prader-Willi syndrome, more in the realm of developmental disability. What I learned later is that the owner of the house is a group that also provides homes and services to adults with other disabilities, including mental health issues. If some neighbors were only wary about any sort of developmental group home inhabiting the nearby real estate, they were positively aghast at the thought of recovering substance abusers or mentally ill individuals living next door. Again, the stigma, and in a world where in normal houses live the teenager who parties incessantly, the aunt who has lavish parties for weeks then retreats for even longer, the many among us who hide our afflictions, for fear of being different, of being noticed, of being shunned… And is it any wonder, when we ourselves fear those who are considered different?

If we do leave the denial, if we have to, finding help is not easy. I know this well, after repeated calls to try to restore services lost in a struggle—services not so easy to get in the first place. Calls to overburdened state agencies go unanswered, even as the calls turn to letters and move up the chain of command. It takes calling a representative and a commissioner, and then, for what? Psychiatrists who prescribe and then never return phone calls for day after day; others who are afraid to take on patients who present too great a risk—a liability; others who do not even take insurance. And then again, a few gems among them. But while we are on waiting lists to see the gems, in my frustration, I wonder again if omega 3s and martial arts and better feng shui could really be a cure-all instead of all this nonsense.

I go through this all in my head, and then turn to the things in my car, the less cold breeze in the parking lot that takes me back to summer breezes I remember so fondly. My car has made its way to the Market Basket, and life is good.

I really do enjoy my trips to the Market Basket. For one thing, it is far cheaper than the supermarket that is closest to my home. For another, I enjoy seeing so many different people. On most trips, I hear little English, but today’s trip was noticeably populated by older couples, most of whom did speak English, and most of whom were quite friendly, although I did notice a few strange looks when I turned around the coffee aisle just unable not to sing along with Andy Gibb.

You know, I still cannot get the song out of my head, and also cannot help thinking of another way to do it. I pondered that this evening, too, again imagining something on the back of a piano, but alas, a torch singer I still am not. “I Just Want To Be Your Everything” is a great song for shopping, though, and it really hit me as I found myself wanting to chant “Come On Eileen, too-loo rye-aye,” that supermarket music has certainly changed since I used to drag along with my mom through Vince’s IGA in Yorkshire Plaza, right on the corner of Laclede Station and Watson Road (which is really Route 66).

Grocery-store music then was characterized by rearranged Beatles melodies, even though most of the ones chosen barely needed it (“Yesterday,” “The Long and Winding Road”), and other pop songs that were rendered nearly unrecognizable by the arrangements… until in a sickening moment in the dairy section you finally understood that it really was a string version of “Havin’ My Baby.” Trips to the store are different now, and maybe a bit more disturbing.

Still, I am fascinated by the selection of tropical produce: chayote, malanga, batata. I like paying $.99/pound for apples instead of $1.49. I love being there with all the boxes moving around the aisles, and the woman in the electric cart asking me if I could reach and grab a can of Folgers off the top shelf, and the man who is telling the butcher not to hand him that hamburg because he’s on a fixed income and that he just doesn’t know about Hillary, and the woman telling her daughter, “Mira, ven aqui,” as the little girl sheepishly puts a box of vanilla wafers back on the shelf.

These grocery adventures are pleasant in themselves, but the soundtrack is part of the experience. Still, although I enjoy the tunes, I’m not really supposed to acknowledge that I actually noticed them. The music has a more insidious purpose that is really unmentionable. I realize this is a fact. The whole brainwashing thing, innocuous enough, it would seem, because it is everywhere. In the midst of it, though, I realized that I was barely noticing at all how happy I was that my kid actually left the house without a fight, and gave me a hug before heading down the street to his school bus stop, on time, and that the day was warm, and the other fifty thousand things that were going on right in front of me in that store because it had a soundtrack that kept me in a certain frame of mind, somewhere in the late 1970s to mid ‘80s, and made me not notice so much else. Well, Muzak’s philosophy is for me to ponder later, or to leave perhaps to the New Yorker, where it has been pondered already (by David Owen, “The Soundtrack to your Life,” 4/10/06).

It does make me think about comfort level, though. How does it feel to go into somewhere with so many people, all ages, nationalities, abilities, all collected there to hunt down the foods that celebrate our differences.. and yet to hear a soundtrack of my young adult life in the Midwest? I wonder.. what if they added a few different songs, something different, from another country, something I have never heard, just thrown in? something else… or perhaps, just no music. Just real people and real food, together. What a concept.

Making a brown stock is something of a meditation, and works best, in my experience, in large kitchens with subzero barns attached.

Sometimes, in fits of boredom over the years, my obsessions have ranged from listening to the same song over and over, to yoga postures, to stirring risotto, to calligraphy. These are not entirely wasted pursuits. After all, any talents I could claim are the result of various fixations. Remember Buffon, “Le genie n’est qu’une longue patience.” I like to think there is some truth in that, considering the rarity of my first-time brilliance in most areas. Practice, repetition, persistence, soon enough it seems good enough; a bit past that, it seems just about right. Making brown stock requires that kind of obsession.

Stocks are winter-time creations. It has taken me a lifetime to admit this, but winter bores me. I lived in many cold, snowy places in my life, so this is quite a shame. Sure, it would have been great to spend the days cross-country skiing or snowshoeing, outside, running inside to make hot chocolate and warm up by the fire. Oh so Vermont. A bit tricky with young kids, especially a lot of them. So, it was at such a time, nursing a baby, entertaining a toddler, watching the snow swirl around the backyard, no phones ringing, nowhere to run to, nowhere to hide, that I baked bread and made stocks. Again, very Vermont. Around that time, the household lore maintained that grocery shopping was a hobby I enjoyed. Not true! Well, maybe in farmers’ markets, in France. Come to think of it, though, I kind of liked the coop in Montpelier, and I admit to enjoying trips to the Market Basket. Still not a hobby, but a great excuse to get out, after all.

But I digress. I did have a bit of shopping to do for my stock. It turns out that you need not so much meaty bones as meat. There used to be a butcher at the Grand Union in Morrisville who seemed to appreciate the notion of a stockpot simmering, and packed up nice bits for me. After doing this more than once, you know when you’ve got a great bone, great meat, with lots of connective tissue, for gelatinous stock… Oh my. I hope no one is disgusted by this.

That’s another thing. I have seen a lot of farm animals in my life, mostly treated kindly, but not always. My family hunted (never caught a damned thing, but it was hardly forbidden). I have pictures of my brother at age seven walking around the woods with a shotgun and an orange hat. I looked out my window for seven years, and saw dairy cows all day, everyday. (Hard to believe they are no longer there, like nearly all the dairy cows I knew when I lived there).

It just seems dishonest to eat a thing unless you can know what it really looks like when it is alive, and when it dies, and think about that. I really have nothing against eating meat, but I want to do it with as much respect to the animal as possible. For some reason, in my book this means thinking about things like feathers (well, not on a cow, obviously) and connective tissue, and shins, and not just picking out those prepared pieces, pre-wrapped in cellophane.

So, my obsession for stock was aided quite a bit by Madeleine Kamman, in her exhaustive “New Making of a Cook”. What a tome! With the commentary, it is pretty hard not to want to please Madame Madeleine. I pity the well-intentioned babysitter who recognized herself as the one who had washed Madeleine’s seasoned omelet pan. Again, I digress. The stock.

Stock is wonderful, because it allows all sorts of digressions, and yet forgives you for them as long as you eventually get back to the matter at hand. In my Vermont kitchen, the excitement built from the first step: roasting the bones, meat, various vegetables, a bouquet garni to add flavor. Into the oven they went, and stayed for some time. Wonderful aromas. I am probably going to forget something here, though, because I do not have the recipe here in front of me as I write this.

I do have things to admit here. I moved into the house I live in now about a year and a half ago, maybe a little more. The last several years have been.. shall we say? yes, busy. I have not thought about obsessive cooking since the oven in my last house broke. I really hated that oven, seemed to have a sort of wind tunnel inside, but that house was not in Vermont, and I do not live there now. And, by the way, I did not break the oven. It was just fate.

Now I have a new house, with a newer oven. So, the potential for obsessive cooking is there, if only I could find my cookbooks. So far, I have uncovered “The Cook’s Bible,” collected recipes from Cook’s Magazine. Now Christopher Kimball is one obsessive cooking man, if I ever saw one. I just cannot maintain that level of perfection in the kitchen. Obsession is one thing; the testing they do in Cook’s Magazine is just nuts. I found my ex-husband’s copy of “365 Ways To Cook Pasta,” which I have to give back to him one of these days. The Julia Child and the vegetarian cookbooks and the Silver Palate, and all those others that I used over the years, including the Helen Corbitt books that my mom handed down, must be in a box in my overstuffed garage. But it is raining today, and I am not inclined to go out and dig around.

Madeleine will simply have to understand if I am depending on my faded memories of meats roasting, stock simmering for hours, pots all over the kitchen, then shallow pans lined up on the frozen tables in the barn. It was such a process, executed over several days. The key was making the stock shimmering, as I interpreted it. How simply amazing!: pouring the filtered water and a little white wine over the roasted meat, celery, onions, carrots, and letting the low heat work its magic. Time passed, time to take all the solid parts out, pouring the stock through cheesecloth, reducing it a little more, then straining it again, skimming the top for fat, or any other evil particles… this indeed made the layers of flavor, simply marvelous.

This repetition went on for some time. By the time I finished, the huge quantities of broth had become a much smaller amount of glorious brown stock, the base of most things magnificent in my kitchen. For the health-conscious, it was nearly fat free. For most others, it was simply heaven. Nothing is more splendid than the meal that braises in the sublime.

Busy lives, crowded minds, fallen tears… so much seems to take from life at times. And yet, the good things always remain, waiting, until we look for them again.

I just put dinner on, and have decided to cheat at the risotto tonight, using the pressure cooker and cheaper arborio rice instead of stirring, stirring, stirring the canaroli. I taste the difference, largely because my hair and clothing don’t bask in the aroma for the time it takes to make it, but I’m not sure the kids care as long as there is plenty. Ah, but to give them taste.

Speaking of taste, during an otherwise lovely ride from Hopkinton yesterday morning, my 11-year-old son begged for me to roll up the windows when I was blasting the Fairport Convention on the van stereo. He said it was embarrassing. Sniff. I thought that the album I had chosen rocked, and had wide appeal to all age groups. Then, he noted that “Matty Groves” was “inappropriate.” Well, hard to argue that, as the lyrics started with Lord Arnold’s wife’s proposition and became increasingly violent. He truly was shocked at the idea of Lord Arnold’s abrupt return to find Matty in bed with his wife, and the murderous ending. Yeah, it is a little brutal, I admit. The part that really gets me is Simon Nicol’s gruff “GET UP” after he asks Matty, “How do you like my feather bed? How do you like my sheets? How do you like my own fair wife, who lies in your arms asleep?” It gets me every time. Still, my snobbery would have me prefer to let my kids learn about murder and adultery this way than to figure out in some giggling OMG moment that “Candy Shop” is a song about fellatio.

Right now I am listening to a CD by Lori Carson, an artist I had discovered at a friend’s house on a late night, with snow falling, turning to ice. I heard the song, “Something’s Got Me” and ordered the album soon after. When I heard the whole album, it was “Snow Come Down” that always reminded me of that night. Situations change, though, and the feelings I had lying on the floor listening to music that night turned into a friendship instead, and a nice one, at that. This evening, though, as the wind picks up and rain thinks of falling, the entire album casts its melancholy mood. Why do I subject myself to this?

Good question. I do have an answer, too.

I have to.

I love the escape of it–or rather, into it. God, I can feel it right now, the raw exposure as she sings. I get the same spine tingling from Beth Gibbons. I remember hearing her for the first time outside Portishead, on a CD from a French music magazine I used to get, “Les inrockuptibles”. I immediately bought the album after hearing one cut, and never looked back. I found it at Archambault in Montreal on one of my weekend excursions from the isolated life I led in northern Vermont… The November “stick season” with its chill grey and smoke from the woodstoves sank into my memories as I heard her remarkable voice sing, “Autumn leaves/beauty’s got a hold on me.” By that time in Vermont, the leaves were long gone, the feeling faded, but “Sand River” is still my favorite song there, one that immediately makes me wish I were in bed, and not alone.

Well, the risotto is ready. It smells marvelous, and I’ll grate the parmigiano reggiano. Mmmmm…. Wow. I forgot about the Todd Rundgren cover on this album. “And you gazed up at me, and the answer was plain to see…” Like that, too.

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Now playing: Lori Carson - Something’s Got Me
via FoxyTunes