Grand Women

Remember in Fools Rush In when Selma Hayek’s character goes to her great grandmom’s house in Mexico? Her Grand is this beautiful, Georgia O’Keefe, Eudora Welty type of gal and you just want to go to her house and quilt or make something fabulous to eat with tamales. I love that movie.

Or there’s the scene in An Affair to Remember when Cary Grant goes to his Grandmother Janou's house and she is beautiful and wise and she hugs on Deborah Kerr (who is sort of in need of some support) and they play the piano together. I love that movie.



My Grands, and the Grands I’ve adopted in my life, are (and were) those kind of girls: huggable, filled with experience, adoring women who walk into the kitchen and come out with something that tastes like every ingredient is the result of someone’s best day.

My husband’s Granny, who I have claimed as my own Grand too, makes mouth-watering apple pies that actually transform a cup of coffee. I’ve noticed they are usually made in celebration of a homecoming.

My 95-year old Grandmom, who has a “gentleman friend” because, as she told me, “he’s too old to call a boyfriend,” is still staggeringly beautiful and makes coconut pie every time someone she loves passes away. There was a time when people at her church looked for coconut pie as a comforting staple in times of grief. And no celebration is complete without her cheesy squash casserole with Ritz crackers and loads of butter.

The Farmer’s Market is starting up here again for the summer and I’ve been thinking about another one of those kind of girls, Diana Kennedy, and how we need to go get some fresh vegetables and try out a recipe.

Ms. Kennedy is this lovely, curious English woman who moved to Mexico with her husband Paul where he was writing for the New York Times. And then he died of cancer. But instead of heading home, she decided to live in Mexico and became sort of an anthropologist, traveling to remote villages and learning from the local people, cooking in their kitchens, quietly respecting and preserving their unique recipes. Her mission is to collect recipes that have been passed down for centuries, but have never been written down or published. I just love that.

She has built a solar-powered adobe eco-house where she grows her own vegetables. In photos, it looks like something from Under the Tuscan Sun.



I did some research and found out that she’s been traveling around Mexico for 47 years now. She asks these great questions from people about what something tastes like and then, before you know it, she’s in their home and they are cooking together. Now there’s a diplomatic approach I can get behind.

One website quoted her as saying, “I never travel in straight lines. The important discoveries in my life have always happened by chance.” Awesome.
Here’s a link to her work: http://www.powells.com/s?kw=Diana+Kennedy&x=0&y=0