Free Born Round: A Story of Family, Food and a Ferocious Appetite by Frank Bruni Page A

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Four
    In the kitchen, Mom was a creature of habit, though the habits were sometimes short-lived. She would become fascinated for a span of months or maybe a whole year with a new dish, new sandwich or particular ingredient, celebrating it and toying with it until it finally I bored her and she moved on to the next thing.
    Picasso had his blue period; Mom had her shrimp period. There was shrimp scampi, of course, which she made with generous measures of butter, garlic and shallots and just a bit of lemon juice and cayenne pepper. There was shrimp Creole—a casserole of sorts involving shrimp, rice, onion and lots of tomato—and there was another shrimp and rice combination, which I liked better, called shrimp Harpin. Shrimp Harpin’s superiority was easily explained. The recipe called for a cup of heavy cream, two tablespoons of butter, a half cup of slivered almonds and a half cup of dry sherry.
    For a while Mom took to wrapping things in bacon. In fact she never completely stopped wrapping things in bacon, but there was definitely a phase of more aggressive, frequent, committed wrapping of things in bacon, and it was a happy phase indeed. If something could be wrapped in bacon, speared with a toothpick and broiled, she did precisely that, and usually served the results as canapés, disregarding the extent to which things wrapped in bacon might fill a person and diminish his or her readiness for the rest of the meal.
    She wrapped chicken livers in bacon. Scallops, too. She wrapped water chestnuts in bacon, though I never really saw the point. When you had bacon on the outside of something, why put a vegetable on the inside? It struck me as a crucial loss of nerve.
    She became obsessed for a while with club sandwiches, layered with bacon, and this was because of the pool that she and Dad decided to put in the forested yard behind our Avon house. It was a grand, ludicrous pool, out of sync with the family’s usually sensible spending habits, a splurge exponentially larger than anything before it. It was twenty yards long, so that Mark, Harry and I could do meaningful laps in it if we wanted. It resembled a lake, its outline curvy, its deck punctuated with enormous boulders that jutted toward, and hung slightly over, the water. Given all the money that had gone into it, Mom all but demanded, from mid-May to late September, that we get ourselves out there and enjoy it, and so she developed what she considered pool-friendly cuisine: guacamole with chips, crudité with dip. And club sandwiches.
    The fact that they had turkey in them allowed her to tell herself that she was making something healthier than hamburgers or hot dogs. She always bought freshly carved turkey or cooked turkey breasts herself and carved them. She carefully toasted the white or wheat bread (her choice depended on her mood and dieting cycle) so that it was firm and golden brown, discarding slices that emerged from the toaster too dark. Then she’d cut the sandwiches into triangular quarters, crucial to her insistence that this was just piddling poolside finger food. A person could have just a quarter sandwich—just a nibble. Who was she kidding? No one in our family stopped at a quarter or even two quarters, and I usually didn’t manage to put the brakes on before five or six.
    I had more discipline and did better with other things: chemistry, American history, Steinbeck, Wharton. At Loomis Chaffee, the private school outside of Hartford to which Mom and Dad sent us, I got As in almost all of my classes in the tenth and eleventh grades. I had editing positions on the school newspaper and the school literary magazine, and, due to those activities and my continued participation in swimming, more friends than I’d ever had before. I was, as Mom and Dad had always prodded me to be, well-rounded. Only the rounded part—well, I felt that it applied to me just a little too literally.
    I had either six or seven or twelve pounds that wouldn’t go away: