good girl dinette: good girl supper on the food network

in may of 2007, the food network came to film one of my good girl suppers for their "power of food" series. the result was a homage to my grandmother, her cooking, and the cooking traditions that she taught me.

before the crew came to film, judy, the producer, and i talked on the phone, to figure out what she wanted to highlight about my good girl suppers. it soon became evident that my stories of my grandma and her cooking would be the focus of the filming. i had to do a lot of thinking about what it would mean to talk about my grandmother. she was a terrific figure, a woman of tremendous wit (and sarcasm), magnetism, talent, drive, and ambition. what did i want to share about the woman who raised me? it wouldn't do to reduce her to a few sentimental memories and recipes. grandma wasn't a sentimental woman. she was a pragmatist. that was how she survived over 40 years of war. when my grandma passed away, my friend an emailed me and wrote the best description of what my grandmother meant to me: matriarch, mother, dictator, teacher, chef. i loved her. she was tough and hard, on herself and the people around her. but the one chink in her armor, the one soft part of her, was her cooking. in other aspects of her life, she was terse, not prone to effusive emotion, rarely giving out approval or praise. but in cooking, she let go of restraint. her cooking was intense and excessively, overwhelmingly generous. the 2 refrigerators and deep freezer in her house were evidence of her largess. don't even think about asking her for a hug, but do ask for seconds, and thirds. our stomachs stretched beyond capacity until our vision blurred, our limbs buckled, and we lay down in surrender in the family room. perhaps because she was such a hard woman, the love she showed in the kitchen was all the more valuable to me as a child.

i didn't know how my stories of my grandma would be received by the production team, but they were the truth, and the only stories i knew to tell. it turned out that i had nothing to worry about, for throughout the course of the filming, during the various breaks we took to re-load film or adjust lighting, different crew members came up to me and shared their own nana/grandma/bubby stories.

click below for the featurette.