Food and Friends

I've written before about food memories and how specific meals can trigger thoughts, evoke powerful feelings and kind of transport you to a different time and place.  One of our dinners, or rather, the preparation for that dinner was one of those experiences for me.  Let me start with the food: baked ziti, something I have prepared countless times for my family and my personal favorite for delivering to friends with new babies and little time for cooking.  This dish is so simple and so versatile that is one of my go-to, can-buy-the-ingredients-with-my-eyes-closed recipes.  It is literally a box of pasta (ziti preferably, but you can sub in anything you like), a jar of spaghetti sauce (my favorite is Newman's Own Marinara), a 15 ounce container of cottage cheese (or ricotta if you like - I prefer the texture of cottage cheese, myself), 8 ounces of shredded mozzarella cheese, divided (about half in the sauce and half sprinkled on top).  Cook the pasta, mix with the sauce and cheese, pour into a baking dish, top with the remaining cheese and pop in the oven for 20 to 30 minutes until the cheese is browned and bubbly.  Good stuff.  It is my younger daughter's favorite meal so we have it fairly frequently.  You can also add pretty much anything you want to it - spinach, kale, chard, chicken, mushrooms, etc.  We usually do the streamlined version - vegetarian, satisfying and totally delicious comfort food.

So, I said that prepping this meal brought up memories for me - stuff I really hadn't thought about in a while.  I originally got this recipe from a friend, many years ago now, who, for a long time, was my closest friend in the world.  She and I were originally work colleagues (man, that sounds really British for this Texas girl, but that's how I want to say it, ok?) and we had children at about the same time.  We both chose to stay at home with our kids and we spent a lot of time together for playdates or on the phone discussing the daily challenges of raising children/being a wife and mother/maintaining our sanity.  We decided that it would be fun to have a meal swap at one point - she would cook a meal for my family and I would cook a meal for hers, just to try different things, not to mention having a meal already cooked at least one day a week.  We shared a number of different recipes from this little exchange, but the baked ziti recipe has been the one that has really stuck with me all this time.  As I put together the ziti that night (which I generally do without conscious thought), I remembered where the recipe came from, how important my friend was to me and especially how her friendship helped me get through those *many* trying times of new motherhood with my daughters.

I don't know why I suddenly remembered the origin of the baked ziti recipe or what part of the preparation (probably my ever present toddler, pulling on my leg) triggered the memories, but, whatever the reason, I am glad that it did.  I find, ever more frequently, that food is a unique force that embeds itself in our consciousness - the smell of a particular combination of ingredients, the sound of something perking away on the stove, even just the act of making a recipe, seemingly by rote memory, can bring us back to a particular time and place.  For me, this particular blast from the past was a much needed jolt of positive energy and a reminder of a friendship that left me with a lasting legacy of laughter, fun and great food.