Who Am I and What Do I Eat?

After Holidays Vegetable Detox Soup

Leeks, onion, carrot, fennel, celery, freshly diced tomato, thyme, bay leaf, a piece of Parmesan rind, water, topped off with a bit of fresh basil and parsley - that's all you need for a pleasant soup.

As far as winters go, it doesn't get much better than this for soup. But after all the heavy foods we enjoyed over the holidays, we were ready for something light and healthy. So my daughter and I whipped up this Vegetable Detox Soup. The perfect thing to fill us up but not weigh us down. And no chicken stock was added. I just plopped in a piece of Parmesan rind and some fresh herbs for flavor and it turned out fantastic.

I don't know about you, but I am dreaming about grills and summertime.

Last night, I went to Supertarget and bought four cartons of Haagen-Daaz 5 Vanilla Bean Ice Cream just to show I had the audacity. It got down to 7 degrees. How crazy is that?

Normally, I like winter. I'm the type of gal who relishes putting on her sweats and curling up with a good book on a cold winter night. My husband hates it, he's grumpy and mumbling something about moving to the equator. But this winter, I've learned something about myself - I like change, I like fluctuations in weather, and I'm ready for this gosh-forsaken, frigid arctic blast to leave. I blame it on my childhood. I grew up in a slightly dysfunctional family with lots of chaos and turmoil, and we always got excited at the onset of inclement weather, it was the only thing more devastating than ourselves.

I must say, this harsh weather is taking its toll. I'm going a bit stir crazy here, so please, bare with me.

A teacher once said there are two things you need to ask yourself: Who are you? And what are you doing? As a young girl growing up on the border of Kansas and Oklahoma, I didn't know who I was or what the hell I was doing.

I first looked to geography for answers. Since where one lives usually says a lot about who one is. But I never felt like I belonged to any specific region, or state, or nationality for that matter. I always envied my friend Allison who could say she was Italian. She had culture, she had food, she had an identity. I, on the other hand, stemmed from a bunch of mutts as white and bland as the doughy Wonder Bread we were eating.

As far as geography was concerned, I wound up spending most of my adult life in Oklahoma, so this didn't help much in my quest for identity. Oklahoma has an identity crisis all its own. We've only been a state for one hundred years, before that, just territory. And now that we are a state, no one claims us. We aren't really part of the southwest region, or Midwest, or great plains, and we really aren't southern either. We're just, Okies. Which, I guess, is an identity of its own, but often a negative one, like in Grapes of Wrath.

Next I looked at my families genealogy, surely this would help me discover my true identity. But we were a jumbled clan of long ago western European descendants and this proved a fruitless endeavor. I was American, whatever that meant.

Religion often plays a crucial role in ones identity. Both my grandmothers were somewhat religious women, in a small town protestant way, but that pretty much dwindled out by the time it got down to me. We weren't a religious family and I certainly had no connections with church or God for that matter.

So here I am, raised in the middle of nowhere on white bread, peanut butter, and green bean casserole wondering who I am and what the hell to eat. So often I see people celebrating their heritage through food - such as my Indian friend from work with her hearty vegetarian cuisine - and my cousin who's other grandmother was full blood German and gave them funny little noodles to eat. I wanted that. I wanted to say, this is who I am and this is what I eat. But food and family heritage have evaded me.

I rarely remember my mother cooking. She barely grocery shopped. We were latch key kids who came home from school hungry and scraped the bottom of the peanut butter jar with a spoon and ate directly from the spoon. Sometimes we even ate uncooked macaroni, crunching it like popcorn. It never dawned on us to boil the stuff, not that we had any butter or sauce to put on it anway.

To be fair, my mother did cook on rare occasions when she had the time. And to this day those foods remain some of my favorites: Reuben sandwiches, tacos, and jambalaya.

Strange, now that I think about it, such an odd assortment of food. I wonder if my mother had a food identity problem as well.

Perhaps this was a trend in our centralized area.

Perhaps this is a good thing.

Now I can pick and choose the foods I want to eat.

I am not limited by culture, or region, or heritage. Tonight I can be Italian, or Mexican, or French, or southern ...

I can tell my kids, be whoever you want to be and eat whatever you want to eat, we are a blank slate.