Free Feeding the Hungry Ghost by Ellen Kanner Page A

is still moist, about 10 minutes.
    Season with salt and pepper. Stir in the lemon juice and parsley. For a pop of protein and bright green color, fold in the edamame, if you like.
    This will keep covered for several days in the fridge, and the flavor improves over time.

    STANDING on CEREMONY
    The big lessons, from seasonal eating to eating together as a family, are a little like sex. It’s all well and good to hear about, but it can seem like the practice or politics in another country — very far removed from your own overstuffed life. It’s only when you experience it yourself that you get that sense of wow, where have I been all these years? May the delights and mysteries of the worldreveal themselves to you in the first go. However, most of us need to lather, rinse, and repeat these lessons over and over again before the grin-making, grateful-to-be-alive feeling or the “Ah, now I get it” feeling sinks in. This is the nature of imprinting for us imperfect beings. So whether you’re instructing or learning, it helps to come to the big lessons with patience. Because it’s always going to be somebody’s first time. And you want it to be fabulous.
    My family steeped me in ritual before I even knew it — stealth induction, very clever. Friday nights, we’d go to the home of Marcella and her husband, my grandfather. His name was Aaron, but he was not the sort of guy I’d dream of calling by his first name. Ever. Even Benjamin, who was twenty-five when he met him, referred to him as Mr. Kanner, and may I say, his voice occasionally broke when he did so.
    The chummiest I got was to call him Grandpa. He didn’t notice me most of the time, and I tried to encourage that by keeping the hell out of his way. We were related and yet like different species to each other. He was not kid friendly, nor was his house, all stone and formal upholstered furniture and breakable objets d’art.
    There were no toys on hand, just one well-worn copy of The Velveteen Rabbit, which I dutifully read every Friday, since my cousins weren’t interested. We were — are — close in age, so when we weren’t busy fighting, we played together, chasing each other down the hall, our shrieks ringing out; and though we were told to be careful, I wiped out on the living-room terrazzo and knocked out my front tooth. It was only a baby tooth, so no harm done, other than initial trauma and profuse bleeding everywhere. Just another Friday evening, another walk along the knife edge between order and chaos, a chaos just held in check by dinner.
    We sat at the dinner table together, the whole family — thatwas just the deal. By the time I was in the picture, the whole family meant Aaron, Marcella, their two grown sons, their wives, five grandchildren, and at least one family friend or distant cousin or someone my grandmother had run into and invited, as well. We crowded around the table — Italian, midcentury, with all its leaves in — my grandparents presiding at either end, me usually squished in between adults, straddling a table leg.
    My grandparents weren’t observant Jews, but even so, Friday night, Sabbath, was special. The table would be set with starched white linen, the kind you never see anymore, sterling, china, and crystal stemware.
    Dinner would mean soup or salad to start; a serious main course, which might be roast leg of lamb or stuffed peppers or spaghetti and meatballs; rolls and butter; potato or rice. There were vegetables, but of a distinctly old-school style, lacking brightness, flavor, freshness, and oomph. In regular rotation — peas and carrots (frozen and then boiled) and gelid iceberg lettuce salads. There were marinated artichoke hearts, which I came to love once I realized their name had nothing to do with choking your heart, and asparagus, canned, anemic, slimy, and, we were told, “a delicacy.” Like that would make us want to eat it.
    On the bright side, there was dessert. Marcella was gifted in the ways of lemon