The Big Salad

J know email is the worst but I would love id you shared and read however you wanted. This is still just A Thing I Write With and I hope you are reading

Is it a travesty to write about salad as October just hit and across Chicago people are wrestling out their window units and dreading the People’s bills on the horizon? Perhaps. This is not to write about, as my friend French Marc says so classily, salade.

I came to love The Big Salad somewhere sliding into my teenage years. On many Sunday evenings from fall and through to Easter, my brother and parents made our way to the other side of the suburb (60004) for supper. On Sundays, Claudia made dinner. At some point she started making the Big Salad.

Going to JimandClaudia’s is so instilled in my memory that the big house and ambush of a garden still sings JimandClaudia’s in my head. Twenty years on it’s funny because that house was really Claudia’s house.

Claudia cooked like the war had ended, like a baptism potluck, like a wake you remembered the food at, like the cousins called from a county over and had time to stop through. How she did it in the galley kitchen in that house or their house in Michigan is now awe-inspiring to me. She grew up outside Detroit with a gaggle of brothers and sisters and had no children of her own. Her sister died young of breast cancer and she kept her nieces and nephews fiercely close.

My father had slid out of Catholicism like any good byproduct of Venezuelan Jesuit schools, but Claudia did not. A good Polish Catholic who found the retirement of Latin mass ridiculous, she was not ever officially my godmother, not in the eyes of Pope John Paul II, but of course she was. My brother who when younger distrusted many happily followed Claudia in her Civic to the hardware store where he was rewarded with balsa gliders and candy. When I reached the age where every adult, especially those close to me, infuriated me, Claudia remained my favorite.

Fall would arrive and she would return from some overnight at their house in Grandhaven with bushels, actual bushels, of Northern Spies. We’d arrive for Sunday supper with a second slab pie, powdered sugar icing in stripes, and take it home for the week. There were potato salads with vinegar and bacon, pots of chili, sauerkraut I wish I’d been braver to eat, pot roasts, stew. Smoked almonds, smoked fish, sliced bread from Fausto’s, and then one fall, The Big Salad.

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I cooked out of utility and because I loved meals I could not get all the time. Porcupine meatballs (not actual porcupine) from my Grandma or Greek salads with oregano and red wine vinagrette and big blocks of feta I’d pick up at the grocer on my blue banana seat bike inspired by all-night diners and the junior high I eat salad now urge. I cooked because my parents worked and I was a lonely adolescent with insatiable hunger, chunky and swollen-chested, and somehow subconciously looking for the ways to care for myself in the future. I did not know it then, but I knew I was probably one of the few people in the 9th grade making low-sodium chicken breast potpie with Bisquick topping from Cooking Light magazine. I’d remember the basics of a dish for years t come.

In my early twenties with the heyday of cooking blogs and my pathological need to save money I focused on the classics: lasagna bolognese, pork shoulder ragu, porky black beans with sofrito, quiche, mediocre bread ala Bittman. For Claudia I decided I needed to master the roast chicken. I would still roast a chicken every Sunday if I had room for the bones in my freezer. Only recently have I remembered the Big Salad.

I’ve been aimless and bouncing around for what seems like years, now. In the first avocado colored kitchen I rented by myself at 25 I made a meal on the weekend and ate it dutifully as leftovers each day during graduate school. Being amongst so many people, working jobs, dating in spite of, well, everything - I wanted to be alone and drinking red wine and listening to music alone on a Sunday. I did not make Big Salads.

When I moved to Minneapolis my wonderful roommates cooked or I ate hummus and turkey rollups after 2nd shifts at a bike warehouse. When I lived on the road I don’t remember what I ate other than meals in cities I loved. When I lived at my parents during COVID I often didn’t cook or brought Trader Joe’s (where I worked) meals home. I’ll do a bulk of the Thanksgiving cooking or Christmas (but not baking); I’m considering undertaking my Tia’s mom’s pavo in red sauce (with no less than 18 ingredients in the SAUCE!) again because it was so pinche good.

The thing is all these big meals are made for people to be shared. I want to make a Big Salad for people in the house I have finally landed in, with enough places for people to sit, eight plates. I should probably get more flatware.

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My parents met Jim and Claudia through work - Jim and my pa worked in hydrocarbon processing - oil, oil, oil. Each week my father put himself into an American Taxi at his office our or house (until I could drive, in which good old UOP paid for Carmen’s gas) and returned, exhausted on Friday. Jim was the same, except suffered due to his height, easily six and a half feet folded into commuter jets down to Texas. My pa had Chile for a time, vanishing on Sundays, then back.

Claudia adopted us, especially my mother, who worked furiously and fought for my brother’s IEPs. They were both working class women from scrappy families and brilliant. Sometimes they’d go to our house where my father grilled on his Weber and Claudia brought a plastic baggie full of chicken breast for Jim.

I was just shy of my 21st birthday when Claudia died. The summer before I would sometimes drive her to chemo and wait in the parking lot. When they left to the house in Grandhaven, often, she’d pay me in Andes mints and cold hard cash to watch the animals and water the garden. I spent hours in their library room (a library room! really!) reading astrology books and mystery novels.

My mother called me on a cheap international cell phone a few days before I returned from study abroad. Spring barely struck London and I would walk bare-armed in the anemic sun. I rode atop a double decker and clumsily answered.

It’s going to be soon, my mother said on the other end. I remember hanging up and listening to my headphones, the bus circling around Oxford Circus, then sitting outside the shared flat on marble steps, smoking shag cigarettes into the stretched out twilight, crying.

My brother often makes fun of me when I talk about cooking beans or saving bones, wondering if I wandered in from the Dust Bowl. But the Dust Bowl brought about Sunday dinner after long church mornings at my grandparents, pot roasts where my grandpa snuck me bits of fat and gristle to gnaw on. Or my grandma making peanut butter fudge, no-bakes, divinity. People came through, the TV trays sat out, men assessing cars. What is it Johnny Cash sings? Something about a Sunday.

Something about a Sunday, my pa admiring Claudia’s gargantuan lilies and bursting tomatoes, the adults talking about the news of the world, a light beer here or there. I did not pick this apartment because the walls are a light green beloved in the 70’s, and I certainly didn’t pick it because of the gas range or old pipes. I’m finally filling it, though, with roasting smells or apple cakes, found furniture and posters I’ve held onto for years, my books, my records. Claudia helped me there too. She loaded up a massive record player and her liquor boxes of records into my teenage bedroom, and I’d lay on the rug listening to Dark Side of the Moon and Little Queen and Madman Across the Water. Recently I found out my dear friend’s husband saved the boxes I gave him when I had to move and couldn’t take them with. I cried.

How do I take what Claudia gave me that I love and wish to do again so fiercely? I text a friend my family met through her back today after being sick, I am making a beef stew and thinking of Claudia. This friend left Grandhaven, sold the giant house across the street where Claudia’s empty house has stayed since she died, and moved to North Carolina. She texts back Claudia would love to see you making beef stew. Crazy that it's been 15 years since we lost her & we still think & talk about her often!!

I don’t know how my parents and Claudia and Jim settled into what they had. I haven’t had a proper party of my own, on my own, since New Year’s 2013. I don’t know how to push more when I say if you’re on this side of town, I’ll be making a roast, a chicken, a stew, a loaf of bread. I mean it. Come over. Come drink a glass of wine and keep me company in the kitchen, put on a record, relax into a week when I send you back with Venezuelan Tupperwares full of leftovers. There’s a post on social media going around from Jo Livingstone, All of society reorganizing around heteronormative family unit suddenly one day when you’re 35 is the worst and you should be ready

An old friend and former roommate said something recently about me I can’t get out of my head: It’s great to live with Carmen - the cooking is so good. I don’t know how to stop how much I love living alone. But I really wish I could feed people. Maybe there’s a whole group of us, acolytes to Hestia, keepers of a hearth even if the table is empty. Maybe Claudia was one of the best of them, and I will be able to cultivate that if I try.

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Anyway, The Big Salad. I could go on about Claudia: how at her Catholic funeral her small nephew brought up a giant plastic tub of OxyClean because Claudia worked for years as a paint buyer at Sears and had a garage and basement full of important supplies; how she was beloved by my grandma; how she asked me good questions; how I’ve never been able to make a potato salad with vinegar and bacon as good as hers; how it felt eerie when the Sears on State abruptly closed, so soon after she died of the same violent breast cancer that took out the women in her family. I miss her very much. I miss knowing how to have the ease of people into your house, normal. I live on the South Side and I guess lately I’m trying to invest more in people who can exemplify what “closeness” is - the bitter part of me says I’ve paid my dues North of Roosevelt. I think she’d like all the places I’ve lived, the Friars next door, my books, my attempts at cabbage fermentation in the crock I inherited from working on the farm. I think she would’ve loved my friends who farm.

A Big Salad has nothing to do with a season, but eating vegetables coming out of the ground sure does taste good. Start with some greenery: chopped big spinach or baby spinach, romaine sliced from their heads.

I will eat red cabbage as a salad at any time. So red cabbage, sliced thin, or maybe green chopped. Carrots in cubes, sliced cucumber, celery. Whatever tomato you may want or stomach, but I like grape or cherry these days.

The Big Salad shines with the rest though: walnuts, cubes of spiral ham from the freezer, chopped bacon, sunflower seeds. I’ve been thinking about dill, but it wasn’t dill: it was Havarti with dill she bought at Valli Produce. If you know where I can find Havarti with dill, I would be much obliged. Chop it in slices. Eat it with sliced almonds and water crackers.

Dressings are up to you, but I believe in dressing a salad. Balsamic was in rotation, but Claudia got me addicted to poppy seed dressing, in the elegant Briana’s bottle with a peach. Chop the whole salad up but leave it composed. Let people serve themselves.

Help with the dishes, even if the cook shoos you away. Eat fudgy brownies with Breyer’s vanilla from the Ghiardelli box with extra chocolate chips, or if you’re lucky, slab pie tart with Northern Spies.