We created a commercial kitchen in the backyard. We did this by using our sandbox toys and old pie pans and bowls. We made pies from mud that were topped with the berries from the yaupon holly trees that we picked off. We baked the pies on the top of air conditioning unit. It was the perfect backyard oven since hot air blew up from the exhaust fan. It used to make Dad really mad because all of the mud dripped into the unit.
Much to Dad's chagrin, we made soup in the water fountain that was part of the landscape design in our early childhood home. We used leaves and petals which we pulled off of all of the different types of plants in the backyards and mixed them all in the basin of the fountain. Our soup had variety and color. We clogged up that fountain many times and always had to assist Dad with draining and cleaning it.
How did these experiences help make us into life-long learners? Did this imaginative playtime mean anything to us and how can one tell? We learned about seasons and nature. Our kitchen creations changed with the season as the availability of our ingredients did plus thanks to Dad we learned the names of the plants as we pulled them from the fountain. Seasonal cooking with fresh ingredients is something Sara and I both do now. And in an interesting twist Sara later went on to study at the highly regarded Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, New York. Just a coincidence or did these types of experiences influence her? You decide.
I have a theory that we are all fashioned towards specific likes and dislikes by the things we played at or watched daily as children. My favorite movie according to both my parents at the calculating age of three was Xanadu, a horrible early 80's roller disco fantasy that features Olivia Newton-John and Gene Kelly. Watching it now thirty years later I see the seeds of the passions that I love, the main character is a troubled artist who falls in love with a muse, and it is set to the music of both classical big band and hair band rock-n-roll complete with synthesizers. I must confess that beside my obviously love of art, I am a huge big band/jazz fanatic, and I love mythology and not just Greek, though I can name almost all 9 of the muses by heart- a fairly difficult task considering that it is usually unstudied until one enter's junior high, and even then the muses take a back seat to the ribald figures of Zeus, Ares, Posidon and Hades or their Roman counterparts. I too made things out of mud, but was more interested in creating structures along with my little brother that our cars could pass through, it's no wonder I don't like cooking, as I cannot recall ever wanted to make berry soup, but my daughter certainly enjoys that task in our backyard on an almost daily basis. Could it be coincidence? Certainly... but wouldn't it be interesting if it were not.
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