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For our latest Inviting Writing, we asked you to send in stories of food and dating: funny stories, sad stories, romantic stories, goofy stories—as long as they were true and involved food. This week’s entry is about being stood up for someone else’s date.

The story comes from Judy Martin, who works for a medical device manufacturer and lives in Cupertino, California. She writes a blog called Tastemonials.

Winner Winner Chicken Dinner

by Judy Martin

Grilled chicken made for a memorable meal. Image courtesy of Flickr user Izik

My husband and I were cruising down Highway 101 to Santa Barbara to visit my son during his sophomore year in college. About halfway there, the cell phone rang. It was my son. “Mom, I won’t be here when you arrive. I need to go on this beach camping trip.”

What! We’re driving seven hours for a visit and he won’t be there? “There’s this girl…” he continued. “There’s a group of us going and she’ll be there. I really want the chance to get to know her better. It’s only one night and I promise I’ll be back for lunch tomorrow.”

Sigh. We agreed to meet for lunch on Saturday. And true to his word, Matt arrived in time for lunch with a report on the previous night’s adventures. He related how they let most of the air out of the tires of our Honda Accord and drove on the beach trying to find the campers, and how the car almost washed into the sea as the tide came in. They had the car towed out of the sand several times and still never found the group with the camping gear. Would you tell this story to your parents?

But they did find the girls. Since they had no camping gear, they went to a friend’s apartment for the night. Fortunately, my son was in possession of the food for the trip. So around midnight, he cooked dinner for everyone and had the opportunity to talk to “the girl.” He was elated.

After lunch, Matt headed out for errands and hopefully some studying (?), and we went to the beach for the afternoon. Shortly after we parted ways, the cell phone rang. It was Matt again. There was hesitation on the line. “The girl,” he reported, was apparently impressed by his cooking the previous night and had invited him to make her dinner tonight. She requested the same dinner again—his secret grilled chicken recipe (marinated in Kraft Italian dressing, he later admits), grilled onions, garlic bread and beer. Remember, this is college.

Now, my son is a master at pleasing the parents. So I knew this was a real dilemma for him to consider ditching us again. This must be important for him to risk our displeasure after we’ve made the long drive to visit. He wouldn’t do this without careful consideration. With a disappointed sigh and a slightly threatening tone I told him, “go make this girl dinner. And she’d better be a winner.”

And was she? You bet she was! Was his dinner? I have no idea—I hadn’t eaten his cooking since his eighth grade Home Arts class. But she saw something in him or his cooking—enough to pique her interest and prompt her to invite him to cook dinner for her that night, their first real date.

Eight years later that special girl, who matured into an amazing woman, married my son. Now twelve years after that first grilled chicken dinner date, she is the mother of my adorable grandson. I have never regretted that I said “go” and he chose her over me for that dinner date. In the end, we were all winners.

Falling in Love Chocolate Mousse Pie. Photo by Jesse Rhodes.

It’s that time once again when people do last-minute shopping for their Oscar parties, which leads to the agonizing task of meal planning. For those of you who really want to work the themed party angle, check out Cooking with the Movies: Meals on Reels. The book draws inspiration from 14 films from all over the world—and from different periods in time—and provides menus that are true to the cinematic source material.

On flipping through, my eyes (propelled by my appetite) made a bee-line for the section devoted to the 2007 film Waitress. It’s a deliciously dark comedy about Jenna (Keri Russell), a waitress with some formidable pie-making skills who is trapped in an emotionally abusive marriage. At key points in the film, we see her make pies whose ingredients and colorful names reflect Jenna’s emotional state: “I Hate My Husband Pie,” a bittersweet chocolate pudding filling that’s drowning in caramel; “Pregnant, Miserable, Self-Pitying Loser Pie,” which combines lumpy oatmeal and fruitcake; “I Can’t Have No Affair Because It’s Wrong and I Don’t Want Earl to Kill Me” pie is a smooth vanilla custard. The movie is worth watching for the food photography alone—though as a whole, I thought it was absolutely wonderful.

For the book, the authors culled the pie recipes from publicity materials made for the film, so you can’t get closer to being in Jenna’s kitchen than this. I opted for the “Falling in Love Chocolate Mousse Pie,” because it’s a quick and easy means to getting a chocolate fix. I cheated a bit and used a prefab pie crust. It’s good to learn how to make your own since it allows you to don that carefully-cultured martyred expression when you tell your friends you did everything from scratch. But for this kind of pie, the crust isn’t the main event, so I’m all for saving time and cutting a corner. A blend of condensed milk, chocolate pudding, baker’s chocolate and a whole pint of stiffly-whipped heavy cream, you can see my results in the picture above. It’s rich and sweet—but only cloyingly so if you overindulge. A perfect, edible metaphor for the early stages of a romance. I also decided to top it off with shaved baker’s chocolate to try to take off a little of that sweet edge—and to cover up a few spots on the pie surface where the tin foil smudged the custard when I wrapped up the pie to let it set up in the fridge. Presentation is everything, right?

I know some of you out there will be way more ambitious than I and take on things like the multi-course meal from Titanic (though the book adapts foods served on the actual ship as the movie took a few gastronomic liberties) or the decadent confections from Chocolat. But hopefully you’ll be inspired to up the ante on how to cook for an Oscar party. (Perhaps serve up a simple danish and coffee combo for the morning after, á la Breakfast at Tiffany’s?) And if you’re looking for further inspiration, check out Lisa’s post on delicious moments on film.

The Shaker Community House in Columbia, NY. Image courtesy of Library of Congress

Sometimes a recipe, especially a historical one, is more than the sum of its instructions. It may not even sound mouthwatering—instead, its appeal might lie in a surprising ingredient or method, what it says about the people who developed it, or the paths of inquiry or imagination it sends you on. The recipe for a cake to celebrate the February 29 birthday of the beloved 18th-century leader of the Shakers, Mother Ann, is all of those things.

Modern versions of the recipe don’t sound much different from typical birthday cakes, except for the suggested addition of peach jam between layers. But a snippet of the original recipe, repeated in The Shakers and the World’s People, by Flo Morse, caught my attention:

Cut a handful of peach twigs, which are filled with sap at this season of the year. Clip the ends and bruise them and beat cake batter with them. This will impart a delicate peach flavor to the cake.

There’s something intriguing, even poignant, about the idea of using twigs to capture the essence of a fruit that’s not in season: Does it really work? Would it work with other fruit trees? So much more romantic-sounding than grabbing a bottle of flavor extract, don’t you think? Some recipes also call for rosewater.

Then there’s the history of Mother Ann and her followers, an endlessly interesting subject in itself. Ann Lee was an illiterate Englishwoman who left a disappointing arranged marriage—none of her four children survived childhood—to join and eventually lead a small and persecuted religious sect. Their official name was the United Society of Believers, but they became known as the Shakers for their kinetic form of worship. In 1774, just as American revolutionaries were fighting to form a nation that would enshrine religious freedom within its Bill of Rights, Lee and a handful of followers emigrated to New York. They set up a community near Albany, New York, where they were able to practice, in relative peace (if not always popularity), their beliefs.

Some of those beliefs were ahead of their time, like gender and racial equality. They became known for making goods that were unfashionably plain by Victorian standards. Today Shaker furniture is prized for its elegant simplicity, but that was hardly the case when Charles Dickens visited a Shaker village in 1842, according to a 2001 article in Smithsonian. “We walked into a grim room, where several grim hats were hanging on grim pegs,” he wrote, “and the time was grimly told by a grim clock, which uttered every tick with a kind of struggle, as if it broke the grim silence reluctantly, and under protest.”

They were (or are, to be precise, for there is one tiny remaining community of believers at Sabbathday Lake, Maine) also pacifists, lived communally, and believed that Christ’s second coming would be spiritual, not in the flesh; as the Sabbathday Lake Shakers’ site explains: “To Mother Ann Lee was given the inner realization that Christ’s Second Coming was a quiet, almost unheralded one within individuals open to the anointed of His spirit.”

One Shaker tenet that has yet to find currency, and which ultimately (and perhaps inevitably) led to their decline, was that all believers should follow Christ’s example and practice celibacy. The group relied on attracting converts—which they did, for a while, establishing new communities throughout the Eastern United States, especially New England. They took in orphans, who were free to choose to leave or stay when they were of age. In addition to the Sabbathday Lake Shaker Village, which includes a museum, a handful of former Shaker sites are open to the public. In August, the Canterbury Shaker Village in New Hampshire commemorates the anniversary of Mother Ann’s arrival in the United States with rosewater-flavored cake. (The Maine Shakers sell rosewater and other flavorings.)

One final note: I was skeptical of the peach-twig story at first, because I used to live about 30 miles north of Albany (which is at the northern end of the Hudson Valley) and never saw or knew of peaches being grown in the area—this is apple country. But in the course of research I found an August 9, 1884, article from The New York Times about that year’s dismal Hudson Valley peach crop. The description amused me, so I had to share:

The first consignment of this season’s peach crop along the Hudson Valley has been shipped by boat to New-York, and, it is safe to say, a more puny-looking or a worse-tasting lot of fruit was never before grown. The peaches are small in size, and, as a rule, hard as a bullet on one side and prematurely ripe on the other. The fruit also has a peculiar color, and the taste resembles that of an apple that has been frozen and thawed out rapidly. They are fuzzy.

Maybe they should have stuck with twig sap.

Before Natalie Portman pirouetted her way into a Best Actress nomination for her performance in Black Swan, there once was a pair of lowly dinner rolls. On their own, they were completely unremarkable; however they had the phenomenally good fortune to be laid on Charlie Chaplin’s table in the 1925 film The Gold Rush. When the silent clown speared them with forks, the rolls launched into a table ballet and created one of cinema’s indelible comedic moments.

Food is an integral part of Chaplin’s films, especially the ones where he donned the guise of the impish, yet gentlemanly “Little Tramp.” In his early films, Chaplin employed “pie in the face”-type food gags, but as his career progressed, food took on more nuanced roles. It was a means to illuminating elements of the Little Tramp’s character, namely his compassion for his fellow underdogs.

Food could also have satiric bite. For The Gold Rush, Chaplin was inspired by vintage photographs of prospectors ascending Chilkoot Pass during the Alaskan gold rush and stories of the Donner Party tragedy. True to the source material, hunger is a recurring theme, except here, it’s played for laughs. Snowbound and stranded in a cabin the middle of nowhere and with no food in the larder, the Tramp prepares a Thanksgiving dinner with what he has on hand—or foot as the case may be. Donning the airs of a gourmet chef, he boils one of his boots and serves it as the main course. Making the best out of dire circumstances, he twirls bootlaces as if they were spaghetti as he dines on a filet of sole of the non-aquatic variety. “In this, Chaplin was right on the mark,” writes Kathryn Taylor Morse in The Nature of Gold: An Environmental History of the Klondike Gold Rush. “Miners were forever hungry, and they wrote constantly about food, craving it, buying it, cooking it and eating it. As Charlie Chaplin must have surmised in portraying Thanksgiving and New Year’s meals in his film, food became a particularly intense topic at holidays. For these special meals, miners made extra efforts to re-create traditional, festive menus with whatever they had on hand.”

Another prime example of Chaplin’s use of food as social commentary is his 1936 film Modern Times, which critiques capitalism, with specific regard to the dehumanizing effects of industrialization. In one scene, the Little Tramp, temporarily employed as a factory worker, is used as a human test subject for a an automatic feeding machine, a modern marvel designed to feed employees at their work stations and eliminate the need for a lunch break. While the demonstration gets off to a smooth start, the machine soon malfunctions. The Tramp, strapped in place and unable to escape, is tormented with food. Goes to show that there are some things that automation can’t quite solve.

The list could go on for pages, but I’ll spare you by simply recommending you rent a few of his films to enjoy over a bowl of popcorn. (In addition to the two movies mentioned above, put City Lights on your list and keep a box of Kleenex handy.) And with Oscar night on the horizon, you should also check out Chaplin’s 1972 acceptance speech. Suspected of un-American activities during the McCarthy-era communist witch hunts, Chaplin was exiled from the United States in 1952 and made his return to the country that made him an international icon to receive this honorary award. He kept things short—unlike many overwhelmed Oscar winners—with a heartfelt thank you and a bit of schtick with a bamboo cane and bowler hat.

Lobster for Valentine's Day? Image courtesy of Flickr user DRB62

Our theme for this month’s Inviting Writing is food and dating. As Lisa explained in a story about three first dates at the same sushi restaurant, we were looking for tales of “first dates, last dates, romantic dates, funny dates, dates that resulted in marriage proposals, dates that were only memorable for what you ate.”

Our first entry comes from Helene Paquin of Toronto. She is a business analyst and social media specialist who blogs about her book club and wine.

Valentine’s Day à la Maine

By Helene Paquin

The last thing I want to do on Valentine’s Day is go to a restaurant. It’s full of potential pitfalls. There are the long lines, the service that is too fast for my liking and the atmosphere of being surrounded by couples who are out to appear normal and very happy when in fact they look miserable, starving for conversation and checking their watches because the baby sitter has to leave at 10:00. It’s like being surrounded by insincere, clichéd greeting cards. Nope, this is not for me.

For the past 20 years I have followed the same ritual. We stay in. We treat ourselves to some good champagne and buy live lobsters to cook at home. It almost didn’t work out that way. Our first Valentine’s together was also the first time we cooked live lobsters. How hard can it be? Boil water, add salt and pop them in there and voilà, a perfect meal. Easy peasy, right?

Let me just say something about live animals…especially live animals with claws. They are feisty creatures and will attempt to escape from a boiling pot onto your kitchen floor given the chance. We actually cut off the rubber bands on the first one and threw him in. However he quickly spread-eagled before hitting the water and wouldn’t fit into the pot. Grabbing tongs, we quickly forced him in, covered the pot and waited. It was awful. We could hear his clanging along the sides of the pot for a few seconds.  We just looked at each other in horror and full of guilt. This was not very romantic at all.

Since then we’ve learned to cook lobsters properly. Rest them on their heads till their tails curl so they are easier to handle.

Maybe Valentine dates should be spent in restaurants after all. They hide where food comes from and spare diners from the realities of food prep. That’s definitely the more romantic way to go.