The Panini Press

The Long Road to China

The Long Road to China

I’ve never felt 100% comfortable with my fine dishes.  I’m more of a paper-plate kinda gal.  (I make that admission at great personal risk—one of my brothers was with the EPA and, when he hears I’ve developed a paper-dependency, he’s liable to dispatch a team of Navy Seals to kidnap and de-program me.  If this article ends abruptly, you’ll know I’ve been whisked off to the Tree-Hugger version of Guantanamo.)

My mother had four sets of china.  We displayed these delicate dishes in a graceful wooden cabinet with glass doors.  Even during the most spirited fights, my brothers and I were careful not to hurl each other into this treasured piece of furniture.  It was a masterpiece of domesticity.  It represented civilized behavior and all that was good and classy in the world.  There was a calming air about it.  In other words, it was the anti-me.

Much to my mom’s chagrin, I spent High School in khakis and denim.  My mother was of the generation that mystically coordinated their every outfit with matching hat, shoes and gloves.  Mom was prim, proper and well-put-together—she was the personification of fine china.  I was more like a plastic plate decorated with cartoons—lots of fun but not exactly elegant.

When my dream-guy and I got engaged we took the traditional trip to Marshall Field’s department store and registered for our own china and silver service.  After minimal debate, (my hubby, like most men, is more concerned with the grub than the plate) we settled on a modern black-and-white Mikasa pattern—not quite funky, but somewhat less-traditional.  It was sophisticated without being classic and light-weight without being dainty.  It was a good match for our casual personalities and we took great pride in owning it.  We also found an effortless, stylish silver pattern similar to my mother’s—knives, forks and spoons that curved slightly to one side at the handle and looked like gentle, shimmering waves.

My mother-in-law soon presented us with a gorgeous, contemporary china cabinet that perfectly complemented the dishes: six feet of black lacquer and slender glass, each shelf accented by subtle lighting.  It was our second piece of new furniture and tangible evidence of our status as grown-ups.  When I inserted our dishes, they shone like violinists on a concert-hall stage.  

One of my hubby’s cousins generously gave us a set of cut-glass stemware to enhance our fine-dining accoutrements.  The seriously chic crystal she bestowed upon us was far beyond anything we would ever have been able to afford on our own.  These weren’t your average drinking vessels—they bore a closer resemblance to dazzling diamonds than lowly mugs.  I was instantly possessed by a paralyzing fear of chipping or breaking them.  

These acquisitions marked the onset of my “Dinnerware-Dysfunction” and my “Fancy-Phobia.”

I proudly debuted my serving goods in our china cabinet as soon as we were wed but exercised obsessive caution when cleaning them or setting the table.  Still, I managed to overcome my trepidation and display them for three years… until the day we moved to California.

It was my life’s dream to relocate to Los Angeles.  As a result, I’d eagerly anticipated every aspect of life on the Coast—everything except what that move would mean for those refined plates and balletic goblets.  I weighed the pros of exhibiting our treasures against the cons of a devastating earthquake.  After much contemplation, I opted to leave our dishes and glassware beneath the sink, in their original boxes, rather than unpacking them.  For the next two years, whenever we had company I performed the time-consuming ritual of unwrapping, dusting and washing every piece.  I became a busboy in my own home.

January 17th, 1994, at 4:30 AM my husband and I awoke to a holocaust of noise and motion.  The Northridge earthquake proceeded to lift and smash every item in our apartment like a two-thousand-pound toddler angrily hurling toys.  For countless hours, that afternoon, I swept crunchy, shattered glass off of our counters, carpets and tiles.  Against all odds, our formal dishes and stemware remained safe and intact within their cardboard cocoons.

Our lovely display-case suffered a different, heartbreaking fate.  It crashed onto the front-room couch.  Once the worst of aftershocks had passed and we began reorganizing our apartment and reassembling our lives, I asked to remove it from our living space.  The prospect of hiding such a beautiful, sentimental piece made my spouse sad.  It was a symbol of his mother’s love and a mark of our maturity.  However, I couldn’t shake the thought of my husband or future children being hit by that lovely but lethally heavy cupboard.   Following some very emotional discussions, my husband allowed me to move the tragically damaged furniture to the storage shed.  

Years passed.  We moved from our apartment to a small house and welcomed two bundles of joy.  The arrival of our bouncing baby boys heralded the Age of the Plastic Plate.  As any parent knows, children are to fine dinnerware as elephants are to Swarovski Crystal.  The two things are mutually exclusive.  For reasons that sometimes escape me, we opted for the kids.  

Fast forward a million meals later… We moved to a bigger house.  Our infants grew into toddlers.  We plopped finger foods directly onto their high-chair trays, foregoing pesky platters.  Our toddlers grew into school-kids.  We served them with colorful plastic bowls and Scooby-Doo plates.  Our grade-schoolers stretched into hungry pre-teens.  We invested in sturdy, attractive Corelle and fed them sandwich after sandwich.  By the dawn of their teenage years, our boys had bypassed the need for dinner service of any kind.  The time that elapsed between my serving the food and their ingesting it was too miniscule for even a dedicated physicist to measure.  Only propriety kept me from pouring the contents of my frying-pans directly into their upturned mouths.

Yet, even as the family’s dining style evolved from chaotic to casual, I experienced a nagging urge to use the fine dishes.  Maybe I was being subconsciously influenced by the paper-plate-averse ghosts of my mother and mother-in-law.  

I found myself pulling out the china each Passover and Thanksgiving.  I occasionally set the table with my “good stuff” when relatives or friends came to dinner.  I eventually unpacked my dishes and stacked them in a conspicuously empty cabinet.  (I never could bring myself to unpack the crystal, despite the earthquake-latches affixed to every cabinet-door.)  

I try to remember the purpose of this elegant service.  It is not meant to intimidate or frighten informal geeks like myself.  It’s created to support and cultivate the joy and ritual of dining.  It is therefore intended to nurture, in the purest sense of the word.  

I know that I’ll never be as comfortable with formal dishes as my mother—despite her quiet nature, she was a warm and gracious hostess.  I know that I will never lay gold-and-silver utensils besides gold-rimmed porcelain platters with the straightforward confidence of my mother-in-law—she was a gregarious “people person” who loved to entertain.  But, for them, I will use my fine dishes with pride whenever I can muster the courage.  I will honor the memory of my mother and mother-in-law with my progress on the long road to china.

Denise Koek is a happily married actress, writer and mom, who currently produces “The Chef’s Wife”and “Uncle Chef.”

The Worst Thanksgiving Ever!

The Worst Thanksgiving Ever

For some reason, people never believe that I broke a tooth on my son’s tushie…. But why wouldn’t that disaster befall us? We experienced everything except cattle disease and demonic posession on that horrible Thanksgiving day.  Cracking a tooth on my baby’s butt was a natural progression.

Eleven years ago, my hubby, my two boys and I flew to Chicago for my brother’s wedding.  At the time only our closest family members knew that my mother was dying of Cancer.  My two brothers’ weddings that year were part of the fabric of Life to which Mom clung so tenaciously.  We adults greeted Thanksgiving morning with the bittersweet awareness that a series of powerful life-cycle events were colliding that day.

But my children—ages 5 and 2—were conscious only of industrial-strength family attention and the tantalizing cooking smells wafting through my mother’s house.  As my 2-year-old gleefully ran laps around the dining room table, we all caught a whiff of a not-so-enticing odor.  My sons had shunned the at-birth toilet training my friends’ daughters seemed to embrace.  Instead, they wore their stink as a badge of honor until the most advanced age possible, at which time even their peers would observe their untrained status in disdain and disgust.  So, at 2, my younger son was thrilled to be sharing pungent proof of his full diaper with everyone in the city-limits.

I was nearly blinded by my mother’s gleaming white carpeting as I pulled down his pants to carefully begin the “changing” maneuver.  I made a mental note to change the tyke as soon as humanly possible so as to avoid any horrific stains.  Before I had even processed this thought, the diaper-clad-critter bolted for a victory lap around the dining room. 

With every fiber of my being—and every fiber of the carpeting at risk—I knew I had to catch him before his diaper leaked.  Just as our escapee passed his daddy’s perch on the couch, my husband lovingly scooped the baby up and wrestled him to his chest so he couldn’t escape again.  I heaved a sigh of relief and bent down to retrieve our tiny fugitive from justice.  My hubby—not seeing me—tossed the giggling toddler into the air.  As my son’s soft tushie slammed into my face, the force of my jaw clamping shut chipped one of my front teeth.

Confused and in pain, I ran to the bathroom mirror.  Ethel Bee Clampett stared back at me.  In seconds I had gone from glamorous Californian to dentally challenged hillbilly.  We were minutes from the arrival of my mother’s guests and three days from 2,400 wedding pictures.   

My mother tried in vain to comfort me.  She claimed not to notice the  snaggle-tooth.  My husband was horrified and apologetic.  My brothers seemed oddly amused.   How could anyone find humor in a woman disfigured by rampaging buttocks?!?!?

I cautiously gummed my mother’s delectable Thanksgiving meal, deliberately avoiding tooth-to-turkey contact like an ungrateful toddler suspicious of table food. Meanwhile, our relatives fussed over the kids and greeted their every pronouncement with a heartfelt “Aaaaw!”  Usually I would accept every compliment offered to my offspring as a heartfelt testimonial to the factory that had produced such worthy products.  That day, however, I was ungrateful and surly, burdened by what I perceived as rotten luck.

Compounding this dilemma was the knowledge that my parents’ feast was the first of three celebrations on the schedule.  We were supposed to have Thanksgiving lunch with my parents, Thanksgiving dinner with my father-in-law’s family and Thanksgiving dessert with my mother-in-law’s family. 

When you live in a different state every visit home is like a cameo appearance and your children are full-fledged celebrities that every relative (i.e., “fan”) clambers to see. I usually wallow in this kind of Show-Off-Palooza like a has-been wallows in “infomercials.”  But that day I dreaded the Holiday Habitrail—because I looked like a hamster.

Struggling to assuage my dental distress, the hubby suggested we call our family friend, Dr. Gary—a dentist, a considerate childhood pal of my husband’s and the only one of our 3,000 Midwest friends we’d forgotten to make plans with before coming to town!  So, not only were we calling him to do us a work-related favor on Thanksgiving, we were imposing on a great guy we had snubbed.  To compound our guilt, he was wonderful when we called.  Dr. Gary immediately offered to meet us at his office and do the required cosmetic touch-up before he’d even digested his stuffing.

We said our good-byes, loaded the children into my father’s new car, and drove to the dentist’s office.  Dr. Gary made my jagged tooth beautiful in record time.  He regaled us with funny stories and showed us photographs of his beautiful family and we responded with deep-seated shame.  What a great guy—we didn’t deserve to wipe the turkey grease off his chin!

As we left, Dr. Gary warned us to be careful pulling out of his parking lot.  It was a peculiar design encircled by multiple telephone poles.  We assured him that we had noted this oddity.

With my newly gorgeous front-tooth, we set out for the suburbs, to attend our second dinner of the day—two hours late.  As we pulled out of the parking space, our 5-year-old proclaimed, “Daddy, there’s a pole.”

In stereotypical Dad tones—half-reassuring/half patronizing—my better half affirmed that he saw the pole behind our car.  Unfortunately we didn’t see the pole beside the car.  A hideous crunching noise ensued.  The boys sat up in their car seats and gasped, “What was that noise?” 

Too distraught to reply, my husband attempted to extricate the car from the pole.  Alas, by the time my hubby had completed this auto-ectomy, there was an appalling dent in my father’s new, forest green car.  In a flash of clairvoyance I was actually able to see into the future and to feel my Dad’s blood pressure rising.

Over and over the boys demanded, “What happened?”  We requested, ever so politely, that they be so kind as to stop asking.  Or maybe I screamed at them.  Time has a way of blurring such insignificant details.

We got to my father-in-law’s home much later than expected.  We were warmly greeted by my father-in-law, his wife, one auntie, three strangers and 87 pounds of food.  Everything looked delicious but we were too wound up to eat.  And the kids, being kids (i.e., one step up from the megaphone, on the evolutionary scale), related the agonizing details of everything that had occurred.  I masked my humiliated blush by smearing cranberries on my face.  I looked like a deranged clown, but at least no one could tell I was embarrassed.

After this second Thanksgiving dinner, we attempted to proceed to our next meal, Thanksgiving dessert. Unfortunately, we were cruelly pressured to consume a  pre-dessert dessert at my father-in-law’s house.  My boys loved this new culinary custom of dessert redundancy.  I fought to resist.  (As they say in the Sci-Fi biz, “Resistance is futile, Earthling”.)

More thoroughly stuffed than the dearly departed turkey, we said our farewells and advanced to the next stop on our Glutton-Fest Tour.

By the time we arrived at my cousin-in-law’s home—two or three hours late—all the other guests had left.  No one remained but the immediate family and three lonely pies.  Our kids had moved beyond exhaustion into a hyper-kinetic state of delirium.  They sparred with the cousins’ kids, fought over toys, forced themselves to eat more sweets and then ran in circles until nausea seemed a foregone conclusion.  The family was warm and gracious, despite our thoughtless tardiness and our sugar-crazed progeny.

Close to midnight, we drove back to the city.  The children fell asleep in the back seat of my parent’s mangled vehicle.  We carried them up to bed and vowed to tell my Dad about his car… first thing in the morning.

My mother, who never failed to “wait up” for me throughout my teenage years, was awake when we got back.  She kissed the sleeping children and gave me a warm, tight hug.  Somehow, that made things better.

I fell asleep that night contemplating how wildly events had spun out of control, yet relieved to have survived the turmoil.

For a long time, I looked upon that day as “The Worst Thanksgiving Ever”.  But as I said before, time has a way of blurring such insignificant details.  Upon reflection I feel as if that hectic day wasn’t at all what it seemed.

It was the last Thanksgiving we shared with my entire family.  It was the last Thanksgiving before 9/11 changed our world forever.  It was the last Thanksgiving we ever spent with my dearest mother.  It was the best Thanksgiving ever.

Denise Koek is a happily married actress, writer and mom, who currently produces “The Chef’s Wife”and “Uncle Chef.”

My Organic Origins

By Phil Anderson

During the late 1980’s I worked as a chef at Gelson’s Markets, an up-scale grocery chain in Los Angeles.  My habit—then as now—was to read constantly in order to keep abreast of the “goings-on” in my industry.  One subject that appeared repeatedly in my culinary magazines and journals was the emergence of the “organics movement.”  Simultaneously, I began seeing more food labeled “organic.”

Read more: My Organic Origins

Dessert Wines

By Larry Hanzo

During the holiday season, many people like to prepare and serve a complete, gut busting dining experience which usually includes a fabulous dessert. And, if you're really going for the brass ring, you'll want the absolute best wine match for the dessert.

Read more: Dessert Wines