The Pelican Pantry

I don’t know if this is going to turn into a memoir. But if I had to pen something along those lines, it would certainly have to do with food – growing up in Wyoming with a British mother who’d gone to college to study “domestic science,” which included cooking; growing up the granddaughter and daughter of grocers, who ran for quite a long time a successful small business; watching the sides of beef get unloaded from the trucks that had come from Denver, the smell of cold cow blood turning my stomach against meat at a pretty young age; being forced to sit at the dinner table until I had cleaned my plate; living with my aunt and uncle and cousins in England when I was 9 or 10, and being told I had to eat the long bend of fat that I’d carefully cut free from my lamb or pork or beef because “we aren’t wasteful like you Americans”; finishing my dinner and being rewarded with the nastiest of desserts. I loved to cook, then I hated to cook, and now, after years of dining out every night, I am cooking again. I love to eat, but there is a lot of stuff that I refuse to. Having control over that is one of my favorite things about adulthood.

Image credits unknown. Date unknown. I do know that that is my grandfather in the upper left, wearing his hard hat so jauntily. I have a copy of this photo framed in my house. I call it “the grocery store mafia.” That is just one of the stories I would like to tell here.